Watched it a while ago. Made me seriously think about AI and what we should use it for. I feel like all the entertainment use cases (image and video gen) are a complete waste.
unfortunately all this work on sora has very real military use case. I personally think all this investment in sora by open AI is largely to create a digital fog of war. Now when a rocket splatters a 6 year old palestinian girl's head across the pavement like a jackson polock painting, They will be able to claim its AI generated by state sponsored actors in order to prevent disruption to the manufactured consent aperatus.
Just watched it yesterday and enjoyed every second of it, the director put more focus on Demis Hassabis which turns out to be a true superhero and I have to confess that I am probably admiring him more that any other human in the tech industry.
He's the leading AI researcher at the 3rd largest company in the world in the middle of an AI boom. He's naturally going to have quite the marketing budget behind him!
Our society is leader based. Otherwise the garbage Trump wouldn't matter but he does. The same thing with garbage Musk. Musk gets what he wants from Tesla because the shareholders believe that Musk is critical to Tesla.
Both are fundamental to their followers.
So its quite clear that you can't just say 'its DeepMind' but have a figure in the middle of it like Dennis.
I caught it on the airplane a few days ago. I would have loved a little more technical depth, but I guess that's pretty much standard for a puff piece.
It is interesting that Hassabis has had the same goal for almost 20 years now. He has a decent chance of hitting it too.
From 1:14:55-1:15:20, within the span of 25 seconds, the way Demis spoke about releasing all known sequences without a shred of doubt was so amazing to see. There wasn't a single second where he worried about the business side of it (profits, earnings, shareholders, investors) —he just knew it had to be open source for the betterment of the world.
Gave me goosebumps. I watched that on repeat for more than 10 times.
DB of known proteins is not where the money can be made, designing new proteins is. This is why AlphaFold3 (that can aid in this) is now wrapped in layers of legalese preventing you to actually use it in the way you want. At least that's what my lifescience users tell me. Big Pharma is now paying Big Money to DeepMind to make use of AF3 ...
i tried to watch it but like AI in general, it was extraordinarily boring. neural nets are really cool technically, but the whole AI thing is just getting old and I couldnt care less where its going
we can guarantee that whether its the birth of superintelligence or just a very powerful but fundamentally limited algorithm, it will not be used for the betterment of mankind, it will be exploited by the few at the top at the expense of the masses
Do you know how long it took us to get to this point? Massive compute, knowledge, alogorithm etc.
Why are you even on HN if the most modern and most impactful technologie leads you to say "i couldn't care less were its going'?
Just a few years ago there was not a single way of just solving image generation, music generation and chat bots which actually able to respond reasonable to you and that in different languages.
There are a couple parts at the start and the end where a lady points her phone camera at stuff and asks an AI about what it sees. Must have been mind-blowing stuff when this section was recorded (2023), but now it's just the bare minimum people expect of their phones.
I was ok with that as "fledgling AI" at the start of the movie/documentary, but thought that going back to it and having the chatbot suggest a chess book opening to Hassabis at the end was cheesy and misleading.
They should have ended the movie on the success of AlphaFold.
Greg Kohs and his team are brilliant. For example, the way it captured the emotional triumph of the AlphaFold achievement. And a lot of other things.
One of the smart choices was that it omitted a whole potential discussion about LLMs (VLMs) etc. and the fact that that part of the AI revolution was not invented in that group, and just showed them using/testing it.
One takeaway could be that you could be one of the world's most renowned AI geniuses and not invent the biggest breakthrough (like transformers). But also somewhat interesting is that even though he had been thinking about this for most of his life, the key technology (transformer-type architecture) was not invented until 2017. And they picked it up and adapted it within 3 years of it being invented.
Also I am wondering if John Jumper and/or other members of the should get a little bit more credit for adapting transformers into Evoformer.
There's some funny comments going on in this thread. Understandably so. What could be more divisive an issue than AI on a silicon valley forum!?
As a brit, I found it to be a really great documentary about the fact that you can be idealistic and still make it. There are, for sure, numerous reasons to give Deepmind shit: Alphabet, potential arms usage, "we're doing research, we're not responsible". The Oppenheimer aspect is not to be lost, we all have to take responsibility for wielding technology.
I was more anti-Deepmind than pro before this, but the truth is as I get older it's nicer to see someone embodying the aspiration of wanton benevolence (for whatever reason) based on scientific reasoning, than to not. To keep it away from the US and acknowledge the benefits of spreading the proverbial "love" to the benefit of all (US included) shows a level of consideration that should not be under-acknowledged.
I like this documentary. Does AGI and the search for it scare me? Hell yes. So do killer mutant spiders descending on earth post nuclear holocaust. It's all about probabilities. To be honest: disease X freaks me out more than a superintelligence built by an organisation willing to donate the research to solve the problems of disease X. Google are assbiscuits, but Deepmind point in the right direction (I know more about their weather and climate forecasting efforts). This at least gave me reason to think some heart is involved...
Two thoughts:
1 the field of ai research moves so fast that any attempt to make a full documentary would we obsolete long before it was released.
2 all I want ai do to right now is to remove generic «dramatic» music from YouTube clips.
What confused me about this documentary was the "at home" scenes for Hassabis.
He is famously a North London lad, but the at home shots are clearly shot from South London looking North (you can tell by the orientation of The Shard and Bishops Gate out of the window).
I thought that this might have been a "stage home" but it appears to be the same place in the background of various video conferences he is on too, so unless those were staged for the documentary (which seems like a lot of effort), then he lives near Crystal Palace and not Highgate?
30 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] threadBoth are fundamental to their followers.
So its quite clear that you can't just say 'its DeepMind' but have a figure in the middle of it like Dennis.
They trust him to lead DeepMind.
I would love to see a real (ie outsider) filmmaker do this - eg an updated ‘Lo and behold’ by Werner Herzog
It is interesting that Hassabis has had the same goal for almost 20 years now. He has a decent chance of hitting it too.
From 1:14:55-1:15:20, within the span of 25 seconds, the way Demis spoke about releasing all known sequences without a shred of doubt was so amazing to see. There wasn't a single second where he worried about the business side of it (profits, earnings, shareholders, investors) —he just knew it had to be open source for the betterment of the world. Gave me goosebumps. I watched that on repeat for more than 10 times.
we can guarantee that whether its the birth of superintelligence or just a very powerful but fundamentally limited algorithm, it will not be used for the betterment of mankind, it will be exploited by the few at the top at the expense of the masses
because thats apparently who we are as a species
Do you know how long it took us to get to this point? Massive compute, knowledge, alogorithm etc.
Why are you even on HN if the most modern and most impactful technologie leads you to say "i couldn't care less were its going'?
Just a few years ago there was not a single way of just solving image generation, music generation and chat bots which actually able to respond reasonable to you and that in different languages.
AlphaFold already helps society today btw.
There are a couple parts at the start and the end where a lady points her phone camera at stuff and asks an AI about what it sees. Must have been mind-blowing stuff when this section was recorded (2023), but now it's just the bare minimum people expect of their phones.
Crazy times we're living in.
They should have ended the movie on the success of AlphaFold.
One of the smart choices was that it omitted a whole potential discussion about LLMs (VLMs) etc. and the fact that that part of the AI revolution was not invented in that group, and just showed them using/testing it.
One takeaway could be that you could be one of the world's most renowned AI geniuses and not invent the biggest breakthrough (like transformers). But also somewhat interesting is that even though he had been thinking about this for most of his life, the key technology (transformer-type architecture) was not invented until 2017. And they picked it up and adapted it within 3 years of it being invented.
Also I am wondering if John Jumper and/or other members of the should get a little bit more credit for adapting transformers into Evoformer.
As a brit, I found it to be a really great documentary about the fact that you can be idealistic and still make it. There are, for sure, numerous reasons to give Deepmind shit: Alphabet, potential arms usage, "we're doing research, we're not responsible". The Oppenheimer aspect is not to be lost, we all have to take responsibility for wielding technology.
I was more anti-Deepmind than pro before this, but the truth is as I get older it's nicer to see someone embodying the aspiration of wanton benevolence (for whatever reason) based on scientific reasoning, than to not. To keep it away from the US and acknowledge the benefits of spreading the proverbial "love" to the benefit of all (US included) shows a level of consideration that should not be under-acknowledged.
I like this documentary. Does AGI and the search for it scare me? Hell yes. So do killer mutant spiders descending on earth post nuclear holocaust. It's all about probabilities. To be honest: disease X freaks me out more than a superintelligence built by an organisation willing to donate the research to solve the problems of disease X. Google are assbiscuits, but Deepmind point in the right direction (I know more about their weather and climate forecasting efforts). This at least gave me reason to think some heart is involved...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38559582#38566618
He is famously a North London lad, but the at home shots are clearly shot from South London looking North (you can tell by the orientation of The Shard and Bishops Gate out of the window).
I thought that this might have been a "stage home" but it appears to be the same place in the background of various video conferences he is on too, so unless those were staged for the documentary (which seems like a lot of effort), then he lives near Crystal Palace and not Highgate?
AI for science is much bigger than RL or Generative AI in science.
There are several classes of models Like operator learning, physics informed neural networks, Fourier operators
That perform magnificently well and have killer applications in various industrial settings
Do read the attached paper if you're curious about AI in science