7 ms·
From Jeff's twitter post: > Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different field
by cjbarber 2mo ago
From Jeff's twitter post:
> Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen <at>NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.
See also: https://www.nae.edu/20782/grand-challenges-project https://www.nae.edu/20782/grand-challenges-project
Those 14 are:
NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering
1. Make Solar Energy Economical
2. Provide Energy from Fusion
3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods
4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle
5. Provide Access to Clean Water
6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure
7. Advance Health Informatics
8. Engineer Better Medicines
9. Reverse Engineer the Brain
10. Prevent Nuclear Terror
11. Secure Cyberspace
12. Enhance Virtual Reality
13. Advance Personalized Learning
14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery
- tcp_handshaker 2mo agoAcquisition back by Google in 3 years, with nothing to show for it. VCs will make a ton.
- tgma 2mo agoand... the VC is Google. Gotta compensate them somehow.
- DataDaoDe 2mo agoMy thoughts exactly
- dude250711 2mo agoFor all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.
- ex1fm3ta 2mo agoSometimes you got to find a way to buy the silence of your top employee, to prevent them from going to the competition. This "start-up" is shallow as hell
- returnInfinity 2mo agoGoogle stock would drop big if this new company was being funded by competitors
- hiddencost 2mo agoThese people are all already making 9 figure compensation packages, I think if they thought they could do the work they wanted at Google, they would.
- tgma 2mo ago9 figure is hardly enough when some kid sells their vscode fork to them for more, is it? Why not just boomerang and get $$$.
- ghostbrainalpha 2mo agoDid that really happen? What was the fork you are talking about?
- tgma 2mo agoIt was a general metaphor but a reference to Windsurf. On the boomerang side, Noam Shazeer went on to do Character AI and came back via acquisition only to leave again to OpenAI.
- xnx 2mo agoGiven the resources that would be available to them at Google: compute resources, data, etc. It's clear they want absolute freedom. Good for them. At this revolutionary turning point in history, I want the smartest people working in whatever area they want.
- dekhn 2mo agocompute resources are scarce and folks are fighting over scraps at this point.
- LogicFailsMe 2mo agoSandbox 2.0 But also, solar power is already economical.
- elicash 2mo agoSeems to have been developed in 2008 (continuing through 2017), which explains the "economical" framing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Engineering#Development_of_the_Grand_Challenges_(2008) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Engineerin...
- staplers 2mo ago3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods If only we could invent a solar-powered, self-replicating, carbon-stacking, habitat-building machine..
- twothreeone 2mo agoYes, plant more trees!
- marcosdumay 2mo agoNot to say we shouldn't grow plants... But we can do it 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more efficiently with machines.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2mo agoWe can?
- la64710 2mo agoPlease add fixing neuro issues like autism add etc on the list. It creates a huge burden on families.
- hiddencost 2mo agoIdk, they never struck me as being into eugenics. What the fuck man? I really don't want some tech startup trying to "fix" my neurodivergence.
- dekhn 2mo agoTreating autism (and preventing it) is not eugenics. That's a talking point some folks raise, but we're talking about intensely pervasive autism, not neurodivergence. Really, please try to do better in your arguments than immediately saying your opponent is like Hitler.
- koolala 2mo agoRoom Temperature Ambient Pressure Super Conductors
- epicureanideal 2mo agoWould be great if they'd add: Reverse human aging. (Maybe a sub-topic under "Engineer Better Medicines".)
- dag100 2mo agoWhy not just add 'mind control' while you're at it. Only death stops stagnation in the end. Without death, especially if death can be avoided by the rich and powerful but not the poor, life will get much, much worse for the average person (until only the rich and their automated capital remain I suppose, in which scenario they will simply turn on each other).
- octoberfranklin 2mo agoThis is the classic "without death, authoritarian depots will be in power forever". But it's actually the wrong way around. Hope that the despot will soon die saps peoples' will to do the difficult and dangerous job of removing them. Take away that hope and they are forced to find the courage.
- dag100 2mo agoForced to find the courage or die trying to. And I really doubt that knowledge that their despot will eventually die has much effect on people's motivation to rebel as in most cases there is a clear line of succession. In many cases there isn't even a single despot to point to. This isn't even considering how such anti-aging technology would prevent despots' mental acuity from deteriorating as they aged - in fact they would probably grow sharper as they gained more experience so to speak. And aging/succession have almost always been one of the greatest destabilizers of a successful authoritarian regime.
- scottyah 2mo agoPeople might be willing to give their known-to-be-finite lives in pursuit of the Greater Good, but the equation changes greatly when you're giving up an eternity for the chance of making things better. More of the population would be aged too, so I think it'd be a lot harder to find the kids that usually die in wars. Especially true if it is the AIs that get us the immortality- it definitely won't be equally spread, and any incumbents have a massive advantage. I think more people would settle for worse conditions to stay alive. Do you think you'd be more likely to revolt at 150yrs old when all your family and yourself can live extremely long to forever? Or do you think the threat of death by killing wouldn't be an issue?
- mrdependable 2mo agoWhich engineering discipline touches most of these?
- tokenscoper 2mo agoPolicy engineering, satirically.
- dbgrman 2mo agoWhy is "12. Enhance Virtual Reality" in there? T_T
- Sivart13 2mo agoI guess if we failed to Prevent Nuclear Terror the bunker denizens of the future are gonna need somewhere to hang out.
- cheschire 2mo agoWhen one of them dies, they want to leave behind a puzzle so complex that entire groups of the population dedicate their lives to solving it within the virtual world. They look old enough to have a lot of favorite 1980’s and 90’s pop culture references, so those will probably be the clues.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoI'm guessing this might be about "teleoperation" (like remote surgery via robots + VR) and being able to remote training as well. The binocular vision VR gives you compared to flat screens help a lot with depth perception for precision of incisions for example.
- xnx 2mo agoHigher-fidelity telepresence could be as significant as the recent COVID work-from-home wave.
- cm2012 2mo agoYou dont see making heaven on earth worth doing?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Sivart13 2mo agoThe solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements. Maybe if our biggest companies did something other than suck up to science denying wackos, some progress could be made in these areas.
- podgietaru 2mo agoPolicy and funding. One of which will be sucked up by this venture.
- RajuChacha108 2mo ago[flagged]
- tbrownaw 2mo agoI do not see how the second sentence follows from the first. I would think the claim in the second sentence would only be relevant in case of the inverse of the claim in the first sentence.
- DaiPlusPlus 2mo ago> I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first. Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical". Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republican party (which dovetailed with the GOP's allying with other science-denying movements of the Bush Jr era like creationism and public-health matters with abstinence-only sex-ed and defunding gun safety research efforts) - means we're decades behind where we could have been... Consider an alternative past, where the GOP had the backbone to resist the oil industry's corruptive influence and instead made a big bet on American Solar; it's entirely possible that instead of MAGA today we'd instead have a right-wing coalition strongly supporting solar and wind energy because they align nicely with American rugged individualism - whereas the current situation on the right is an unprincipled farce with inconsistencies in policy positions at every turn.
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoI would say 5, 6, 10 can be even done today if we had right politicians that can make policies for the people
- merona_io 2mo agoagreed
- darth_avocado 2mo ago> Make Solar Energy Economical Isn’t it already?
- Marha01 2mo agoNot enough. The more economical it is, the better.
- omnimus 2mo agoThe paradox of solar is that more economical it is for the end users the less money is there to be made. So nobody wants to invest in it.
- gowld 2mo agoThat's solved by either private monopoly charging money to fund investment, or public monopoly raising taxes to fund investment.
- wcfrobert 2mo agoThis was basically solved by massive subsidies from the Chinese government. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-clean-tech-developing-countries https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-clean-tech-developing-cou...
- ares623 2mo agoJust make oil uneconomical
- glenstein 2mo agoDefinitely pretty far along imo. But maybe they consider the progress bar to be at 75% or 80% rather than 100%.
- frollogaston 2mo agoPeople on HN keep saying it is, but I'm still not seeing it. Companies are building datacenters in vast, sun-blasted deserts and still choosing to power those with natural gas. This in turn makes people complain about emissions pledges being reversed, but if it were economical, no pledge would be needed. Of course, USA has cheaper oil/gas than other countries. But if you look elsewhere, rich countries are subsidizing solar, poor ones are basically not using it.
- lovlar 2mo ago> 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain For what purpose? To replace humans? To make social media more addictive? To master brain manipulation?
- RajuChacha108 2mo agoTo do human brain activities at scale.
- willy_k 2mo agoSo the second option then.
- fcarraldo 2mo agoThis is called a “corporation”
- RajuChacha108 2mo agoYes.
- tantalor 2mo agoWe have a good understanding of the function (and more importantly dysfunction of) kidneys, lungs, heart, etc. from high level to cellular level. For brain, our understanding is fuzzy, more like "this part is important for that behavior" or "here is how neuron works" but we don't have a holistic understanding. If we had that, we could more easily diagnose and treat neurological disorder.
- captainclam 2mo agoI imagine a good model of the brain would contribute enormously to alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> For what purpose? To understand, same reason you reverse engineer anything. Doesn't have to have a further goal than that, understanding the brain better helps in so many ways. But like most technology, obviously can be used for bad too. Should we just skip researching some topics then?
- vovavili 2mo agoVery honorable effort, but a lot of these seem to touch heavily regulated industries impeded by unwise or outdated policy no less than by the lack of clever engineering - medicine, education, urbanism, energy. I wonder if they've given some thought to the key blocking factor as well.
- dgellow 2mo agoSuch a weird list. How is preventing nuclear terror an engineering problem?
- vanviegen 2mo agoSatellite/drone detection of nuclear material? Shooting missiles out of the sky?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- roncesvalles 2mo agoAnd what about the terrorism that exists today?
- ryan_n 2mo agoYup this was super weird to me. There are other equally likely "world ending" things that they chose to ignore of nuclear, such as bio-weapons. Very strange list..
- petra 2mo agoCreation of nuclear reactors that are useless for terrorists could help
- beloch 2mo agoThey make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website: "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today." This is the same goal as every other AI company out there. Automate away the human employees and let a small number of "people" (note that they do not say scientists or engineers for this part) take the credit and financial rewards for every good thing this human-free system produces.
- sejje 2mo agoWhy shouldn't they? Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?
- zahlman 2mo agoIn what sense is solar energy not already economical?
- delta_p_delta_x 2mo ago> Provide Access to Clean Water ??? We don't need any AI for this. Start with separated sewage/wastewater and stormwater drains. Then accredited and highly scrutinised wastewater treatment and discharge into water bodies (or see below for a high-tech solution). As for clean water to the home, direct those stormwater drains to new reservoirs which sustain freshwater aquatic life. Protect aquifers from over-drainage, and build pipelines from water-abundant regions to water-scarce regions. To reclaim waste water or treat unknown water sources back to potable/semiconductor standards we have ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, pH adjustment, fluoridation, desalination, softening (which is generally obviated by RO...). This is basically Singapore's NEWater. Good sanitation is a financial and political problem. The engineering has been solved for decades now.
- michaelbarton 2mo agoAgree. Same for better medicines. We could get pretty far just by getting existing medicines that work to people who need them.
- lokar 2mo agoSure you do, go full EA: Build a better surveillance ads system, and use (some of) that cash to pay for water projects.
- lkbm 2mo ago> Good sanitation is a financial and political problem. The engineering has been solved for decades now. This was true of computers, phones, books, washing machines, refrigerators, A/C...most technologies. Turns out that doing the addition engineering to figure out how to do these things cheaply makes the political and financial problems way easier.
- downrightmike 2mo agoSuburban sprawl needs to go as it is a complete waste of infrastructure
- 2mo ago
- go_elmo 2mo ago4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle Easy solution - eat less products that pass an animal first - reduces nitrogen pollution by 10x intantly, low tech. I'd re-formulate: 4. Make people more flexible to changing their mindsets & habits - this is the ultimate problem.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2mo agoEasier to just make factory farms illegal no?
- judah 2mo agoIn other words, a boil-the-ocean scheme. Solutions that require a great many humans to change an ingrained behavior are usually non-starters.
- go_elmo 2mo agoMost agricultural subsidies flow towards those harmful animal products, giving alternatives a fair treatment with subsidies could induce a meaningful shift already. But again - political and thus hard on a non technical level
- mikelitoris 2mo agoThis list smells of so much tech bro “I can do better than the people that have been working in the field for 20 years” egotistical attitude that permeates silicon valley. Why do software engineers think they are smarter than everyone else? Is it because they earn more than most people? But then bankers and finance bros should think they are gods? Also, solar energy is already economical!? Do they mean more economical?
- aidis9136264 2mo agoYou’re right. It’s better to just not try and let other people do good things
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoOr actually work with the people with domain expertise.
- mikelitoris 2mo agoThanks for all the down votes tech bros! Really proving my point
- fuzzfactor 2mo ago>But then bankers and finance bros should think they are gods? Have you ever seen anything to the contrary? Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote
- Marha01 2mo ago>This list smells of so much tech bro “I can do better than the people that have been working in the field for 20 years” egotistical attitude that permeates silicon valley. Well, they did solve some math conjectures recently that the people working in the field for many years did not... Also AlphaFold.
- unclebucknasty 2mo agoThis reads as hype of the kind: "well, we can't reliably do these rather mundane things with AI, but we're going to run it extra hard and extra long in some novel way, and it will do amazing things". The issues are with verification and with detecting drift from the goal. These are related, if not roughly the same issue. And, if they can solve this, then they will have essentially fixed AI. Maybe even AGI. But, if this were the goal, then it seems more reasonable to solve the relatively more mundane verifiable challenges (e.g. generating solid, reliable code). Then, working up from there. And, that's exactly what gives this the hype smell. No use for solving problems that don't get the oohs and aahs. Just straight to NAE Grand Challenge problems.
- sroussey 2mo ago15. Cut AI energy use by 1000x while increasing processing speed 1000x Obvious near term trillions dollar market to disrupt.
- democracy 2mo agodillusional millionaires
- downrightmike 2mo ago1. Make Solar Energy Economical - Disallow fossil fuels 2. Provide Energy from Fusion - See 1 3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods See 1 4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle - See 1 5. Provide Access to Clean Water - See 1 6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - See 1 7. Advance Health Informatics - See 1 8. Engineer Better Medicines - See 1 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain - See 1 10. Prevent Nuclear Terror - See 1 11. Secure Cyberspace - See 1 12. Enhance Virtual Reality - See 1 13. Advance Personalized Learning - See 1 14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery - See 1 FF is the real threat in time, money, health. Can't sweep aside that it will destroy most life on Earth and we'll never get to the other things if we are at the mercy of FF
- ShadowOfThePit 2mo agoHoly shit, you are so full of yourself. This is such a stupid take with zero nuance. As if banning fossil fuels will help with any of those things, besides the first one. Little more than "Fossil Fuels are the root of all evil" performative bullshit.
- downrightmike 2mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208314
- worldsavior 2mo agoWhat solving these challenges benefit us? Some of them make sense, but enhance virtual reality? Reverse engineer the brain? Yeah, good luck with that.
- Valakas_ 2mo ago1. Develop AGI 2-14. ???
- akoboldfrying 2mo ago15. Unscramble an Egg 16. Make Everyone Nice 17. Finally Impress a Girl
- swiftcoder 2mo ago> 1. Make Solar Energy Economical This one is already solved, right? The price of panels and batteries is on trend to displace all other forms of power generation within our lifetime
- grumbelbart2 2mo agoPanels absolutely, their price is more and more dominated by installation costs. You can probably use automation to bring that down as well, especially for large-scale installations. Not sure if that requires AI research though, it's more an engineering and funding challenge. Batteries are still open. While they do get cheaper, there is still a lot of room to improve. And battery chemistry is something where a lot of research, trial and error, healthy intuition is necessary. I'd say that is more a field where an AI based approach might make sense.
- ulfw 2mo agoSounds a bit like everything and anything to be honest. Focus?
- fuzzfactor 2mo agoLooks like they are concentrating on No. 14 and it remains to be seen how much serious progress can be made if more of Google's resources are focused on this than anybody else has ever done or could compare to. Plus it should be plain to see how complete the solution is to 14, whether it will be fully solved, or almost completely, before diverting resources toward moving up the list to tackle other worthwhile objectives. If not fully solved I would not call that abandonment, but nobody could deny it would amount to an intentional slowdown regardless. I still remember the day when Google became available on the general internet, and it's been a while. Take it from an old science dude, a lot can be detected over decades of observation that you can not get any other way. Under laboratory conditions or not ;) Looking at the list there are a few standouts that I can't imagine Google wouldn't be worlds ahead by now if they had only doubled-down on the "Don't Be Evil" mission every time they had the chance, rather than watering it down as we have seen. Naturally I'm biased after doing 14 my whole life without real justification for moving up the list myself, since I still have no complete solution, I'm only human after all.
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago- Still doesnt solve the core problems - Eliminate racism - Eliminate poverty - Eradicate crime - Eradicate corruption - Reverse climate change 100% - wake me up when you got an AI project capable of doing this one
- grapeorangesoda 2mo agoWhat is the most impressive thing Jeff has ever done? I only see "co-created" "co-founded" "managed a team" - what did he actually do?
- scottyah 2mo agoHere's a list of accomplishments: https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- amai 2mo ago> Make Solar Energy Economical That is already solved. > Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods That is not necessary, because 1 is solved. > Reverse engineer the brain What for? There was already the european human brain project, which didn't do anything useful. > Prevent nuclear terror Easy one: Every country stops developing nuclear weapons and destroys existing ones. It seems this list itself has many flaws. Maybe we need a bigger computer which figures out the questions we really need to ask.
- storus 2mo agoMany of those require a paradigm shift in our understanding of Universe, so I am not sure they are achievable with any convex combination of existing knowledge. We'd need some sharp mind connecting the dots but with heavy use of AI and incentives to use it, we might just never give a chance for such mind to arise.
- arionhardison 2mo agoI think this should and can be done openly: https://opendl.ai https://opendl.ai 1. Make Solar Energy Economical — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/194 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/194 2. Provide Energy from Fusion — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/206 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/206 3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/196 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/196 4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/197 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/197 5. Provide Access to Clean Water — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/195 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/195 6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/193 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/193 7. Advance Health Informatics — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/203 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/203 8. Engineer Better Medicines — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/200 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/200 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/205 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/205 10. Prevent Nuclear Terror — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/204 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/204 11. Secure Cyberspace — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/201 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/201 12. Enhance Virtual Reality — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/202 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/202 13. Advance Personalized Learning — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/199 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/199 14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery — https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/198 https://github.com/orgs/HardisonCo/projects/198 Specs and the per-challenge process lists: https://github.com/HardisonCo/opendl https://github.com/HardisonCo/opendl It should also be funded by the Gov. IMO and 100% for oublic benifit e.g.: nsf.dev
- muddi900 2mo agoSolar Energy is already quite economical.
- highmastdon 2mo agoThis list is so absurd. We’ll face a bigger problem sooner rather than later, which is population collapse. Youth don’t procreate amy more. Birth numbers are at an all time low. We see the issue arise in rats and the experiment is all too relevant for the current age of social media and fearmongering (John B. Calhoun’s rodent “utopia” experiment). All these “Grand Challenge” problems seem trivial to that. Furthermore: Why is 1 here when 2 is present. Again, solar is usually not relevant when we want power when it’s dark… even theoretical it wouldn’t work. We’d need a high capacity dirt cheap storage, and even then we can’t keep it till winter when there’s no sun to go around and effectively supply 3. Irrelevant when there’s population collapse. And even then, why would we want this instead of reforestation and low depth water protection from fishing and environmental issues. 5. How is this even a problem. Unless we got corrupt(ed/able) governments (read: lobbies) that allow exemptions in every law designed to protect the environment (also, settlements are a twisted way to fill governments pockets instead of rooting out evil) 7/8/9 the inverse effects are even worse health, as everything is fixable. 9 would incur even more social isolation, more so than the internet did 10 seems to be the first that’s actually reasonable Same for 11 For 12 see 9 13 yes but that’s something that a self learner would already be able to do. AI is at a level that we can manage /rant