The DeepMind Institute

Posted by vertigoruntime 1 day ago

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Comment by spyckie2 22 hours 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.

Comment by jatora 20 hours 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.

Comment by mepiethree 14 hours 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

Comment by alex-moon 13 hours 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?

Comment by ElProlactin 15 hours ago

> mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit

And what about for the rest of the world? What do you do with all the people in middle income countries that don't have an economic and tax structure like the US?

Comment by spyckie2 12 hours ago

If you read the article lots of these policies originate or are modeled after other countries policies. The us isn’t exactly a shining beacon welfare state.

Comment by ElProlactin 11 hours ago

Sorry, I've spent more than two decades living in mostly developing countries. I don't see much here from or for the 75% of the world population that lives in middle income countries that are trying to achieve high income status.

Comment by inquirerGeneral 13 hours ago

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Comment by etrvic 21 hours 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?

Comment by lukax 12 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vertigoruntime

This looks like a new account from a PR agency focusing on AI labs.

Comment by ablation 6 hours ago

Astroturfing. Surprisingly effective in this case.

Comment by jiggawatts 21 hours ago

The machines are starting to astrotruf the narrative that their takeover is ”not so bad, really”.

Comment by joaohaas 19 hours 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.

Comment by nsagent 1 day 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.

Comment by pixl97 23 hours ago

Exactly how many cognitive capabilities are needed before it becomes a problem?

Comment by watwut 3 hours ago

Any single one is "a problem". However, extinction level of a problem, which is what they are talking about, a lot more.

Comment by verdverm 23 hours 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

(still the best Ai video I have seen, also a work of art)

Comment by partyficial 9 hours 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.

Comment by ozgrakkurt 23 hours ago

> like the writing did for memory and the printing press for knowledge distribution

This blob of text seems to mean nothing

Comment by pixl97 23 hours ago

I'm not actually sure how you could come to that conclusion.

Maybe you need to learn more about the language uplift.

Comment by ozgrakkurt 13 hours ago

There being terms and relations doesn't mean that they relate in the way that is supposed here.

"writing" isn't a technology in a video game that you research and improves the knowledge preservation instantly. It has a lot of components that it needs to be effective in the way that is described here, and it really wasn't that effective even coming to way later ages than the age that it was "found"(?).

The relations described here aren't anologous to "Ai separated humans from language" so they seem like just some arbitrary things to say on the side.

Comment by verdverm 4 hours ago

watch the Opus 23 video, he uses many more words more eloquently, it's really a top notch production

Comment by verdverm 23 hours ago

What happened to the knowledge in the elder's mind when they died, prior to writing? What changed about that once we had writing?

Comment by jatora 20 hours ago

ever heard of the game "telephone"?

Comment by verdverm 20 hours ago

yup, what always happened in the end?

why is writing things down better?

Comment by pixl97 15 hours ago

>why is writing things down better?

For the same reason we make kids write out math problems rather than just reciting them. It engages different parts of the brain for one, you gain an expanded amount of context by doing so.

The next thing has to do with human memory, when you remember something it is never read only. Recalling memory can adjust your neurons and change the memory, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Hence why eyewitness testimony is mostly trash.

Writing it down also provides a larger workspace for making changes that you can loop over. Quite often things sound fine in our mind, then we write it, and reread it and we realize its wrong. These days people commonly use this in agentic workflows. One agent will conceptualize an idea, and then it's passed off to another agent with a clean context to review for logical flaws. Reading ones own text does the same things for humans, we don't load the full memory context of what we wrote and it seemingly allows us to iterate over the problem differently.

And I guess lastly, human voice is very low bandwidth. A wagon full of well written books is far easier to manage than the humans that contain that knowledge. The reader is at their leisure to learn and the speaker isn't inconvenienced by being at someones beck and call.

Comment by patcon 14 hours ago

I agree with your premise, but writing things down is not "better" but "different". Oral histories have a strange rapid way of evolving by only preserving structure that matters to many and contributes to fitness of many. Cultures that didnt know how to transmit the "right" parts of oral history, they ceased to be that same failed culture, and became another culture made of those new stories.

Writing locks in and requires the evolution of other forms of evolution, as the Word can no longer evolve during transmission.

I say that while being firmly on your side in the larger back-and-forth exchange here :)

Comment by verdverm 4 hours ago

I was thinking about this when I almost had to walk under a ladder the other day (and get bad luck). That one seems like an oral story that arose from people being hurt, whereas crossing the path of a black cat, while also supposedly bestowing bad luck, seems to have no plausible rationale.

Comment by Eueudhsbsj32 23 hours ago

> Not sure we are anywhere close to all the cognitive capabilities of the human brain...

In which capabilities are AI not already close to or beyond that of a human brain?

Comment by nsagent 20 hours ago

Here are a few:

* Forming a long lasting memory from a single encounter

* Speed of adaptation to new environments

* Deft manual dexterity, like playing the violin and needlework

* Competing in a triathlon (requires running, biking, and swimming)

* Having a single agent that can do ALL of those things and more

Humans understand and perform tasks in many more than just the few modalities current model providers have focused on. I'm not discounting the utility of current models in the limited domains they operate in, but they are no where close to being generalists like a human or other animals.

Comment by againstapples 18 hours ago

How long do you think it will be before AI can do all the things you listed?

Comment by daveguy 14 hours ago

75 years and counting and considering we don't have any plan to get to a single one of those things, I'm going to say 75 years. Computation alone is at least 30 years. You may not appreciate the complexity of biological systems, but single cell organisms have more capability to adapt than LLMs.

Comment by partyficial 10 hours ago

75 years and we get to play Victor Frankenstein ?

seems like a very short timeline to me.

Comment by raffraffraff 6 hours ago

A human brain has qualities that make it very different from AI, but the same as other living creatures: it's alive, it can feel (sensations, pains, pleasures, emotions) that give it rich experiences and memories, and it hardwired to continue existing and protecting the body it is inside. So: motivation, desires, fears, and continued consciousness and thought without any external person having to poke or prod it into "doing".

None of the models I've downloaded have sprung to life spontaneously, or done anything remotely unpredictable. None of them can act without input. They all have strictly limited ways to receive input and pass output. They aren't alive, can't feel, don't have experiences. The fact that they are a phenomenon that emerge from billions of snippets of our language lets them express languages in extremely convincing ways, and they are extremely impressive in what they can do. But this isn't Short Circuit or D.A.R.Y.L. or the Terminator, none of them have feelings. None of them continue to think after the program exits.

Without those characteristics they can only generate based on what they've ingested. The capabilities are still astonishing, but they're still dead things, and nobody will ever risk their life to protect the model "context" from getting "killed"

Comment by webern777 21 hours ago

I don't feel like the models are becoming any better at writing.

Rap lyrics are a good test. They are on the level of a censored version of Insane Clown Posse. Just terrible.

Comment by talon8635 19 hours ago

The goal post seems to be changing weekly:

It can’t even play a basic video game!

Now it can

It can never beat the best human go player!

Now it can

It can’t even make a video of will smith eating food!

Now it can

It can’t do basic math!

Now it can

It can’t code as well as a junior?

Not it can

It can’t pass the bar or other certificate exams!

Now it can

It’s never going to meet senior level programmers!

Now Linus says it’s better at coding than him

It can’t do high level maths!

Now it can

It can’t solve math problems humans cant!

Now it can

It can’t do RSI

…

Comment by talon8635 16 hours ago

It can’t pass the Turing test!

That old thing?

Comment by idiotsecant 22 hours ago

The ability to solve general problems previously insoluble using only experiential data and modification to internal world models.

Comment by aesthesia 22 hours ago

So, like ARC-AGI-3? I'm sympathetic to the notion that the things we're able to measure are necessarily going to miss important aspects of capability and intelligence. But people are attempting to measure this kind of thing, and models keep getting better at it.

Comment by daveguy 14 hours ago

And yet, curiously, they fall flat on their silicone asses until they have a copy of the test to "train on".

Comment by chpatrick 21 hours ago

They've read a few thousand years of experiential data in text form.

Comment by jkuli 22 hours ago

politics

Comment by ikrenji 22 hours ago

maybe if AI was progressing linearly we wouldn't be close, but if it's progressing exponentially then all bets are off

Comment by Forgeties79 19 hours ago

Until an LLM can sustain a conversation with me for more than 20 to 30 minutes without becoming incoherent I’m just not even entertaining any idea that we have reached AGI.

Comment by bossyTeacher 22 hours ago

> They are simply looking to steer AI policy discussions. It's basically an in-house think tank.

For a guy who spent his life imagining and realising dreams in video games and cognitive abilities in artificial neural networks, it has to be very soul destroying for Demis to spend his time doing something as frivolous as this.

Comment by leoc 21 hours ago

I don't know, Hassabis always seems to have been willing and able to do PR and put himself out there, in addition to having the technical muscle.

Comment by bossyTeacher 21 hours ago

Didn't he get kicked out of the company he founded? Deep Mind does not have a CEO anymore

Comment by leoc 21 hours ago

So it seems, but what of it? That wasn't his first career setback, and I'm sure he's still trying to get interesting work done at Isomorphic and maybe elsewhere in addition to working the PR pump for Alphabet.

Comment by 13 hours ago

Comment by ElProlactin 15 hours 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.

Comment by ACV001 23 hours 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).

Comment by vismit2000 12 hours ago

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

Comment by tungolcild 9 hours 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...

Comment by credit_guy 22 hours 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?

Comment by totallygeeky 21 hours 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.

Comment by FailMore 19 hours ago

I felt the same when reading

Comment by 0gs 23 hours ago

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

Comment by Kalanos 21 hours ago

so glad they spun out a non-profit!

Comment by ipsum2 1 day 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.

Comment by trollbridge 1 day ago

Nonetheless, there are great articles up on there, such as:

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.)

Comment by ppaattrriicckk 23 hours 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.

Comment by trollbridge 16 hours 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.

Comment by dude250711 1 day ago

The word "institute" gives an aura of credibility without some boring accreditation. Though not sure every country allows that.

Comment by bix6 23 hours ago

How can they even pretend to distance themselves from Google…

Comment by dgellow 1 day 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

Comment by sicktriple 23 hours ago

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

Comment by dnnehgf 18 hours ago

Woah. Where?

Comment by sicktriple 13 hours 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.

Comment by chrisjj 23 hours ago

Just a new shop front. Nothing to see here.

Comment by eine1 20 hours ago

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