Inside the California lab that shows the contradiction at the heart of the trillion-dollar AI race

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, known for his extreme reserve, recently opened the doors of the Googleplex, the company's headquarters in California, to show it to the rest of the world. Inside the campus laboratory now resides one of the most potentially valuable objects for the economy of the entire planet, a tiny square not yet contaminated by world opinion, called TPU (Tensor Processing Unit).

It is still in development, but one day it will power every artificial intelligence query that goes through Google. According to Pichai, ‘artificial intelligence is the most revolutionary technology humanity has ever worked on - it has extraordinary potential, but we will have to deal with the social changes it will bring.’ The technology in question is undoubtedly a resource with unparalleled potential, but this does not diminish the enormous damage it has already caused in the creative, professional and, above all, environmental sectors.

The entire sector is in a sort of precarious balance, in a bubble that could burst at any moment. Who will take the credit, or the blame, for bursting it?