5 ms·

>This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is proba

by khurs 3mo ago

>This is a pivotal moment in human history. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities the brain has, is probably only a few short years away. There is a heatwave in London, perhaps Demis needs to stay out of the sun and drink more water. Or perhaps he is seeking more funding/a fight to maintain his divisions AGI research budget.

password54321 3mo ago
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.
gizajob 3mo ago
[flagged]
- khurs 3mo ago
  On the STEM side, yes no doubt he is a lot smarter than me. But as per the documentary of his life, he is wholly focused on AGI and will remain unfulfilled if he, or indeed anyone else, doesn't achieve it within his lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Game
  - tangenter 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Zigurd 3mo ago
      Hassabis is a genuine prodigy and genius by any measure you would care to pick. Unlike a handful of others supposed tech leaders I can think of. Just how smart? "A few short years" sounds like someone smart enough to know how to make a safe prediction.
      - khurs 3mo ago
        More so, as he put the word probably in too. >"...probably only a few short years away."
        suttontom 3mo ago
        I'm glad it's a few short years instead of a few long years.
      - ninjin 3mo ago
        But even geniuses make mistakes. For example, Demis bet hard against language having any sort of real impact in AI research. So hard in fact that DeepMind nearly had its language research team walk out on them as they were about to be labelled as "applied". Now, to be fair, once the evidence was mounting that large language models rather than pure reinforcement learning was the way forward Demis and DeepMind changed course and has been great at catching up. However, it is important to remember that no person is infallible.
        suttontom 3mo ago
        This is interesting, would being labelled "applied" be considered an insult to them?
        ninjin 3mo ago
        No, but it would have been a move from the research division to the applications division at the time. This is around ten years ago, between Atari (pre-Google acquisition) and AlphaGo (post-Google acquisition), so I am unsure exactly what the effect would have been inside the organisation. But, if it was bad enough for people to want to leave I suspect it can not just have been about the label. I should emphasise that DeepMind (based in London and having a very large degree of independence until the merger in 2023) and Google DeepMind (remember now that Google's research labs across the globe got merged into this entity, including the one in London that was previously split from DeepMind "proper", so it can be hard to tell at times what one means by "DeepMind") has always produced good research. But what led to the LLM explosion primarily came from Google Research Mountain View (Transformer), Google Research Seattle (BERT), OpenAI (GPT-3), and various academic labs. During this time DeepMind had a broad research agenda, but my impression is that most resources went towards more traditional deep learning agents in 3D environments, foundational algorithmic research, and games (StarCraft 2). I would provide more detail, but as as an NLP researcher, I did frankly not pay much attention to DeepMind in that era as what was interesting to me just came from elsewhere. When Google made its first big move into LLMs, its first interesting work did not come out of DeepMind, but rather again Mountain View with PaLM in 2022. Someone with closer connections to Demis at the time can probably explain why the research agenda was what it was, but I lack those connections and DeepMind (even now) has been notoriously tight-lipped since the founding of OpenAI (Demis allegedly sees OpenAI as founded on DeepMind technology by interns and staff walking out on them and remember OpenAI's initial focus on games with Dota 2 compared to DeepMind's with StarCraft 2) and was rather insular compared to Google Research, FAIR, etc. I say "was", but not because DeepMind is now more open, but rather that all industry research outlets are now incredibly tight-lipped after LLMs becoming a product and point of pride among them. At this point, research is held back for maybe even a year before publication or never published at all to deny any perceived advantage to the competition.
- Zsfe510asG 3mo ago
  Why does he scrape other people's works then and turn them into a sausage algorithmically? Would he not create something directly instead?

by khurs 3mo ago

password54321 3mo ago

Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.

gizajob 3mo ago

[flagged]

khurs 3mo ago
On the STEM side, yes no doubt he is a lot smarter than me. But as per the documentary of his life, he is wholly focused on AGI and will remain unfulfilled if he, or indeed anyone else, doesn't achieve it within his lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Game
- tangenter 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Zigurd 3mo ago
    Hassabis is a genuine prodigy and genius by any measure you would care to pick. Unlike a handful of others supposed tech leaders I can think of. Just how smart? "A few short years" sounds like someone smart enough to know how to make a safe prediction.
    - khurs 3mo ago
      More so, as he put the word probably in too. >"...probably only a few short years away."
      - suttontom 3mo ago
        I'm glad it's a few short years instead of a few long years.
    - ninjin 3mo ago
      But even geniuses make mistakes. For example, Demis bet hard against language having any sort of real impact in AI research. So hard in fact that DeepMind nearly had its language research team walk out on them as they were about to be labelled as "applied". Now, to be fair, once the evidence was mounting that large language models rather than pure reinforcement learning was the way forward Demis and DeepMind changed course and has been great at catching up. However, it is important to remember that no person is infallible.
      - suttontom 3mo ago
        This is interesting, would being labelled "applied" be considered an insult to them?
        ninjin 3mo ago
        No, but it would have been a move from the research division to the applications division at the time. This is around ten years ago, between Atari (pre-Google acquisition) and AlphaGo (post-Google acquisition), so I am unsure exactly what the effect would have been inside the organisation. But, if it was bad enough for people to want to leave I suspect it can not just have been about the label. I should emphasise that DeepMind (based in London and having a very large degree of independence until the merger in 2023) and Google DeepMind (remember now that Google's research labs across the globe got merged into this entity, including the one in London that was previously split from DeepMind "proper", so it can be hard to tell at times what one means by "DeepMind") has always produced good research. But what led to the LLM explosion primarily came from Google Research Mountain View (Transformer), Google Research Seattle (BERT), OpenAI (GPT-3), and various academic labs. During this time DeepMind had a broad research agenda, but my impression is that most resources went towards more traditional deep learning agents in 3D environments, foundational algorithmic research, and games (StarCraft 2). I would provide more detail, but as as an NLP researcher, I did frankly not pay much attention to DeepMind in that era as what was interesting to me just came from elsewhere. When Google made its first big move into LLMs, its first interesting work did not come out of DeepMind, but rather again Mountain View with PaLM in 2022. Someone with closer connections to Demis at the time can probably explain why the research agenda was what it was, but I lack those connections and DeepMind (even now) has been notoriously tight-lipped since the founding of OpenAI (Demis allegedly sees OpenAI as founded on DeepMind technology by interns and staff walking out on them and remember OpenAI's initial focus on games with Dota 2 compared to DeepMind's with StarCraft 2) and was rather insular compared to Google Research, FAIR, etc. I say "was", but not because DeepMind is now more open, but rather that all industry research outlets are now incredibly tight-lipped after LLMs becoming a product and point of pride among them. At this point, research is held back for maybe even a year before publication or never published at all to deny any perceived advantage to the competition.
Zsfe510asG 3mo ago
Why does he scrape other people's works then and turn them into a sausage algorithmically? Would he not create something directly instead?