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The DeepMind Institute

ipsum2 10d ago
Tl;DR: It's not a new organization, or non-profit institute. It's a Substack/blog. > DMI is a platform for researchers and thinkers from across Google DeepMind, Google, and the wider global research community to work on and publish creative, deeply informed ideas about a world with AGI. They will not always agree, and they will likely change their minds, as more data and information comes to light at the fast-moving frontier. We created this institute precisely because broad-based intellectual discussion and debate are required to arrive at a consensus about how to address the challenges and opportunities we face as a society.
- dude250711 10d ago
  The word "institute" gives an aura of credibility without some boring accreditation. Though not sure every country allows that.
- trollbridge 10d ago
  Nonetheless, there are great articles up on there, such as: https://institute.deepmind.com/essays/the-case-for-reasoning-transparency/ https://institute.deepmind.com/essays/the-case-for-reasoning... (Hiding chains of thought is one of the most harmful things I think OAI/Anthr. has done, altough Google Gemini also encrypts its chains of thought, so it's interesting to see the DeepMind Institute crticising this.)
  - ppaattrriicckk 10d ago
    My read is that they're criticizing moving the reasoning (more) into the latent space, such that not even researchers/safety-evaluators can actually see what's going on. Of course this still then has a 'trust me, bro' feel to it, but making it outright impossible to reasonably inspect the CoT is a significantly larger and riskier step, IMO.
    - trollbridge 9d ago
      At least there are technical reasons to argue in favour of moving some CoT into latent space. Encrypting CoT is just plain nuts yet we’ve all accepted it as normal.
- dgellow 10d ago
  So, a think tank, to lobby governments > We created this institute precisely because broad-based intellectual discussion and debate are required to arrive at a consensus about how to address the challenges and opportunities we face as a society. Something tells me that consensus will never arrive to the conclusion that we should shut down that whole industry
- bix6 10d ago
  How can they even pretend to distance themselves from Google…
nsagent 10d ago
They are simply looking to steer AI policy discussions. It's basically an in-house think tank. It has all the trappings, especially with ominous prognostications like: Today’s AI systems have impressive capabilities and the rapid pace of innovation suggests we’re now approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities of the human brain. Not sure we are anywhere close to all the cognitive capabilities of the human brain... not even a severely lobotomized one.
- pixl97 10d ago
  Exactly how many cognitive capabilities are needed before it becomes a problem?
  - verdverm 10d ago
    Just one, the ability to use language, it's causing all sorts of problems for us because we evolved to recognize other humans as the only ones having this capability. Ai separated humans from language, like the writing did for memory and the printing press for knowledge distribution. "AI does to us what American Cheese did to food" by Opus 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbmC2aWhjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbmC2aWhjY (still the best Ai video I have seen, also a work of art)
    - partyficial 9d ago
      Rarely do I sit through a 40 minute youtube video end to end, fully engaged - above was one of them. It is the only video in that channel, and worth it.
      - verdverm 9d ago
        Truly a one-hit wonder! He has some ambitions for more videos, based on comment replies, but it would be way more legendary to have a single video forever, make a new channel and I'll sub to that one too
    - 10d ago
0gs 10d ago
wow i thought the attributions were for the vector graphic things and was like "ok demis is in his illustrator bag too!"
chrisjj 10d ago
Just a new shop front. Nothing to see here.
ACV001 10d ago
I wonder if they could make the font even greyer on that website. MORE GREY because I am still able to read it (bearly).
sicktriple 10d ago
Google citing Mark Fisher was not on my Postmodern-hell-world bingo card.
- dnnehgf 9d ago
  Woah. Where?
  - sicktriple 9d ago
    On the "Principles for a New Utopia" page, the first line is: >"Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." They cite Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson (and misspell his name, incidentally), but I've always attributed this phrase to Fisher. I guess citing kpunk would have probably made the simulation we all live in actually implode.
credit_guy 10d ago
Here's my opinion on the "pacing the frontier" issue. Recursive self improvement can accelerate AI advances a lot. Whoever nails it first, has a huge first mover's advantage. But OpenAI is taking a "move fast and break things" attitude. This is making life very difficult for Anthropic: how can you retain your edge when you keep measuring twice to cut once, but your competitor keeps blowing things up left and right? Google, who was left a little bit behind anyway, is more than happy to join the calls for taking a more cautious approach to AI development. Hence DeepMind Institute. Sam Altman has no option than to pretend he agrees with all these ideas. What else is he supposed to say?
spyckie2 10d ago
Their economic policy article is quite good: - need for faster, better and more accurate measurements of the things we care about - 3 scenarios of impact ranging from mild to major disruption - mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit - major disruption policies are also pretty logical, emphasizing owning a share of the profits of AI - AI evaluators to sort and weigh the policies for their effectiveness It looks like to me a lot of thinking, research, and work put into the piece. I know people will gripe at using AI evaluators to score and weigh policies for effectiveness but if you read any amount of research papers, they do researcher evaluated scoring, which translates to "me, a 26 year old PHD candidate who hasn't held a job yet, and my roommate who stayed up all night with me to tell me his vibes on the subject". It is IMO wrong and lazy to dismiss these pieces as being the same level as Dario or Sam's blog posts / speeches / call to actions, these are actual research papers.
- jatora 9d ago
  "these are actual research papers." Not in any sense of that term are these research papers. Not lazy, sure, but a couple conceptual tables does not a research paper make.
  - mepiethree 9d ago
    The economic article is a summary of a preprint paper that surveyed thousands of Americans. Seems like a research paper to me, but I don’t know economics well. Am I missing something? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7470000 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7470000
    - alex-moon 9d ago
      A summary of a research article isn't a research article. Do you think newspapers are scholarly journals? Also, you do understand that anyone can just upload a document to SSRN, right? "Preprint" doesn't actually mean anything academically. Also, the methodology of that paper is absurd: Google trained a model and then asked that model what it thought about AI policy. Can you not think of any way bias might be less than controlled for doing it this way?
etrvic 9d ago
Does anyone have any idea why most of today’s top links are submitted by the same account, one that is 11 days old?
- jiggawatts 9d ago
  The machines are starting to astrotruf the narrative that their takeover is ”not so bad, really”.
- joaohaas 9d ago
  Ain't nothing new, most AI-related posts have been like this for a while. The fact that these come from bots at least gives me hope that the fact a few good posts come up every day from the sea of slop means the actual humans still appreciate good writing.
- lukax 9d ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vertigoruntime https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vertigoruntime This looks like a new account from a PR agency focusing on AI labs.
- ablation 9d ago
  Astroturfing. Surprisingly effective in this case.
totallygeeky 9d ago
Crazy that these labs keep throwing around entirely unsubstantiated claims like "AGI is right around the corner". Given the enormity of the problem I'd argue we're not really any closer than a decade ago, especially given LLM shortcomings.
- FailMore 9d ago
  I felt the same when reading
Kalanos 9d ago
so glad they spun out a non-profit!
eine1 9d ago
[dead]
ElProlactin 9d ago
> Bold thinking on AGI from the lab that pioneered the field. The best part of technology: the people who brought you the "disruption" are the ones who promise you they have the solution to all the problems it caused.
deleted 9d ago
[deleted]
vismit2000 9d ago
Similarly there is Goldman Sachs Global Institute: https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/goldman-sachs-global-institute https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/goldman-sachs-global...
tungolcild 9d ago
Hassabis is so worried about the impact of AI on humanity that he spun out a website in three minutes using Gemini At least he could have done a better job with Claude, IMHO...

Tl;DR: It's not a new organization, or non-profit institute. It's a Substack/blog. > DMI is a platform for researchers and thinkers from across Google DeepMind, Google, and the wider global research community to work on and publish creative, deeply informed ideas about a world with AGI. They will not always agree, and they will likely change their minds, as more data and information comes to light at the fast-moving frontier. We created this institute precisely because broad-based intellectual discussion and debate are required to arrive at a consensus about how to address the challenges and opportunities we face as a society.

dude250711 10d ago
The word "institute" gives an aura of credibility without some boring accreditation. Though not sure every country allows that.
trollbridge 10d ago
Nonetheless, there are great articles up on there, such as: https://institute.deepmind.com/essays/the-case-for-reasoning-transparency/ https://institute.deepmind.com/essays/the-case-for-reasoning... (Hiding chains of thought is one of the most harmful things I think OAI/Anthr. has done, altough Google Gemini also encrypts its chains of thought, so it's interesting to see the DeepMind Institute crticising this.)
- ppaattrriicckk 10d ago
  My read is that they're criticizing moving the reasoning (more) into the latent space, such that not even researchers/safety-evaluators can actually see what's going on. Of course this still then has a 'trust me, bro' feel to it, but making it outright impossible to reasonably inspect the CoT is a significantly larger and riskier step, IMO.
  - trollbridge 9d ago
    At least there are technical reasons to argue in favour of moving some CoT into latent space. Encrypting CoT is just plain nuts yet we’ve all accepted it as normal.
dgellow 10d ago
So, a think tank, to lobby governments > We created this institute precisely because broad-based intellectual discussion and debate are required to arrive at a consensus about how to address the challenges and opportunities we face as a society. Something tells me that consensus will never arrive to the conclusion that we should shut down that whole industry
bix6 10d ago
How can they even pretend to distance themselves from Google…

nsagent 10d ago

They are simply looking to steer AI policy discussions. It's basically an in-house think tank. It has all the trappings, especially with ominous prognostications like: Today’s AI systems have impressive capabilities and the rapid pace of innovation suggests we’re now approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities of the human brain. Not sure we are anywhere close to all the cognitive capabilities of the human brain... not even a severely lobotomized one.

pixl97 10d ago
Exactly how many cognitive capabilities are needed before it becomes a problem?
- verdverm 10d ago
  Just one, the ability to use language, it's causing all sorts of problems for us because we evolved to recognize other humans as the only ones having this capability. Ai separated humans from language, like the writing did for memory and the printing press for knowledge distribution. "AI does to us what American Cheese did to food" by Opus 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbmC2aWhjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbmC2aWhjY (still the best Ai video I have seen, also a work of art)
  - partyficial 9d ago
    Rarely do I sit through a 40 minute youtube video end to end, fully engaged - above was one of them. It is the only video in that channel, and worth it.
    - verdverm 9d ago
      Truly a one-hit wonder! He has some ambitions for more videos, based on comment replies, but it would be way more legendary to have a single video forever, make a new channel and I'll sub to that one too
  - 10d ago

0gs 10d ago

wow i thought the attributions were for the vector graphic things and was like "ok demis is in his illustrator bag too!"

chrisjj 10d ago

Just a new shop front. Nothing to see here.

ACV001 10d ago

I wonder if they could make the font even greyer on that website. MORE GREY because I am still able to read it (bearly).

sicktriple 10d ago

Google citing Mark Fisher was not on my Postmodern-hell-world bingo card.

dnnehgf 9d ago
Woah. Where?
- sicktriple 9d ago
  On the "Principles for a New Utopia" page, the first line is: >"Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." They cite Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson (and misspell his name, incidentally), but I've always attributed this phrase to Fisher. I guess citing kpunk would have probably made the simulation we all live in actually implode.

credit_guy 10d ago

Here's my opinion on the "pacing the frontier" issue. Recursive self improvement can accelerate AI advances a lot. Whoever nails it first, has a huge first mover's advantage. But OpenAI is taking a "move fast and break things" attitude. This is making life very difficult for Anthropic: how can you retain your edge when you keep measuring twice to cut once, but your competitor keeps blowing things up left and right? Google, who was left a little bit behind anyway, is more than happy to join the calls for taking a more cautious approach to AI development. Hence DeepMind Institute. Sam Altman has no option than to pretend he agrees with all these ideas. What else is he supposed to say?

spyckie2 10d ago

Their economic policy article is quite good: - need for faster, better and more accurate measurements of the things we care about - 3 scenarios of impact ranging from mild to major disruption - mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit - major disruption policies are also pretty logical, emphasizing owning a share of the profits of AI - AI evaluators to sort and weigh the policies for their effectiveness It looks like to me a lot of thinking, research, and work put into the piece. I know people will gripe at using AI evaluators to score and weigh policies for effectiveness but if you read any amount of research papers, they do researcher evaluated scoring, which translates to "me, a 26 year old PHD candidate who hasn't held a job yet, and my roommate who stayed up all night with me to tell me his vibes on the subject". It is IMO wrong and lazy to dismiss these pieces as being the same level as Dario or Sam's blog posts / speeches / call to actions, these are actual research papers.

jatora 9d ago
"these are actual research papers." Not in any sense of that term are these research papers. Not lazy, sure, but a couple conceptual tables does not a research paper make.
- mepiethree 9d ago
  The economic article is a summary of a preprint paper that surveyed thousands of Americans. Seems like a research paper to me, but I don’t know economics well. Am I missing something? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7470000 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7470000
  - alex-moon 9d ago
    A summary of a research article isn't a research article. Do you think newspapers are scholarly journals? Also, you do understand that anyone can just upload a document to SSRN, right? "Preprint" doesn't actually mean anything academically. Also, the methodology of that paper is absurd: Google trained a model and then asked that model what it thought about AI policy. Can you not think of any way bias might be less than controlled for doing it this way?

etrvic 9d ago

Does anyone have any idea why most of today’s top links are submitted by the same account, one that is 11 days old?

jiggawatts 9d ago
The machines are starting to astrotruf the narrative that their takeover is ”not so bad, really”.
joaohaas 9d ago
Ain't nothing new, most AI-related posts have been like this for a while. The fact that these come from bots at least gives me hope that the fact a few good posts come up every day from the sea of slop means the actual humans still appreciate good writing.
lukax 9d ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vertigoruntime https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vertigoruntime This looks like a new account from a PR agency focusing on AI labs.
ablation 9d ago
Astroturfing. Surprisingly effective in this case.

totallygeeky 9d ago

Crazy that these labs keep throwing around entirely unsubstantiated claims like "AGI is right around the corner". Given the enormity of the problem I'd argue we're not really any closer than a decade ago, especially given LLM shortcomings.

FailMore 9d ago
I felt the same when reading

Kalanos 9d ago

so glad they spun out a non-profit!

eine1 9d ago

[dead]

ElProlactin 9d ago

> Bold thinking on AGI from the lab that pioneered the field. The best part of technology: the people who brought you the "disruption" are the ones who promise you they have the solution to all the problems it caused.

deleted 9d ago

[deleted]

vismit2000 9d ago

Similarly there is Goldman Sachs Global Institute: https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/goldman-sachs-global-institute https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/goldman-sachs-global...

tungolcild 9d ago

Hassabis is so worried about the impact of AI on humanity that he spun out a website in three minutes using Gemini At least he could have done a better job with Claude, IMHO...