Hacker News

The DeepMind Institute

• 43 Comments
• 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.

  By spyckie2 5 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.

  By jatora 3 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?

  By etrvic 5 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.

  By joaohaas 2 hours ago

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

  By jiggawatts 4 hours 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.

  By nsagent 7 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?

  By Eueudhsbsj32 6 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.

  By nsagent 3 hours ago

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

  By againstapples an hour 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.

  By webern777 4 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
  …

  By talon8635 2 hours ago

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

  By idiotsecant 6 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.

  By aesthesia 5 hours ago

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

  By chpatrick 5 hours ago

• politics

  By jkuli 6 hours ago

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

  By pixl97 7 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)

  By verdverm 7 hours ago

• > like the writing did for memory and the printing press for knowledge distribution
  This blob of text seems to mean nothing

  By ozgrakkurt 6 hours ago

• I'm not actually sure how you could come to that conclusion.
  Maybe you need to learn more about the language uplift.

  By pixl97 6 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?

  By verdverm 6 hours ago

• ever heard of the game "telephone"?

  By jatora 3 hours ago

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

  By ikrenji 5 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.

  By Forgeties79 3 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.

  By bossyTeacher 6 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.

  By leoc 5 hours ago

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

  By bossyTeacher 5 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.

  By leoc 4 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?

  By credit_guy 6 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).

  By ACV001 7 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.

  By totallygeeky 4 hours ago

• I felt the same when reading

  By FailMore 2 hours ago

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

  By 0gs 7 hours ago

• so glad they spun out a non-profit!

  By Kalanos 4 hours 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.

  By ipsum2 8 hours 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.)

  By trollbridge 7 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.

  By ppaattrriicckk 7 hours ago

• How can they even pretend to distance themselves from Google…

  By bix6 7 hours 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

  By dgellow 7 hours ago

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

  By dude250711 7 hours ago

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

  By sicktriple 7 hours ago

• Woah. Where?

  By dnnehgf 2 hours ago

• Just a new shop front. Nothing to see here.

  By chrisjj 7 hours ago