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.
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.
The chatbots and image editors are just a side-show. The real value is coming in e.g. chemistry (Alpha fold etc all), fusion research, weather prediction etc.
None of that has reached the market yet. If it was up to the sciences alone, AI couldn't bear the weight of its own costs.
It also needs to be vertically integrated to make money, otherwise it's a handout to the materials science company. I can't see any of the AI companies stretching themselves that thin. So they give it away for goodwill or good PR.
That's not really true. Commercial weather prediction has reached the market, and a drug (sorry, can't find the new s link) that was found by AI-accelerated drug discovery is now in clinical testing
Why are images and video a complete waste? This makes no sense to me.
Right now the generators aren’t effective but they are definitely stepping stones to something better in the future.
If that future thing produces video, movies and pictures better than anything humanity can produce at a rate faster than we can produce things… how is that a waste?
It can arguably be bad for society but definitely not a waste.
Let me phrase it a bit differently, then: AI generated cats in Ghibli style are a waste, we should definitely do less of that. I did not hold that opinion before the documentary
You might have said the same thing about GPUs for 20 years when they were mostly for games, before they turned out to be essential for AI. All the entertainment use cases were directly funding development of the next generation of computing all along.
DeepMind's new [edit: apparently now old] weather forecast model is similar in architecture to the toys that generate videos of horses addressing Congress or cats wearing sombreros. The technology moves forward and while some of the new applications are not important, other applications of the same technology may be important.
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.
I first assumed it was a pirated copy uploaded to Youtube that their filters had somehow missed.
Moderators: Please change the link; feels kind of unethical to bait someone into paying for this now. Especially given that the production is most likely paid for by Google itself.
That woulnd't necessarily mean it's not worth the time to watch it though.
Well, two things: it's the last sentence of the film; being on hour into something you're calling propaganda is brave.
Anyways. I thought the documentary was inspiring. Deepmind are the only lab that has historically prioritized science over consumer-facing product (that's changing now, however). I think their work with AlphaFold is commendable.
It's science under the creative boundary of binary/symbols. And as analog thinkers, we should be developing far greater tools than these glass ceilings. And yes, having finished the film, it's far more propagandic than it began as.
Science is exceeding the envelop of paradox, and what I see here is obeying the envelope in order to justify the binary as a path to AGI. It's not a path. The symbol is a bottleneck.
Everything between your years is an electrochemical process. It's all math and there is no "creative boundary." There's plenty to criticize in AI hype that we're going to get to machine intelligence very soon. I suspect a lot of the hype is oriented towards getting favorable treatment from the government if not outright subsidies. But claiming that there are fundamental barriers is a losing bet.
It doesn't happen "btwn ears" and math is an illusion of imprecision. The fundamental barrier is frameworks and computers will not be involved. There will be software obviously. But it will never be computed.
Your mind emerges from a network of neurons. Machine models are probably far from enabling that kind of emergence, but if what's going on between our ears isn't computation, it's magic.
It's not magic. It's neural syntax. And nothing trapped by computation is occurring. It's not a model, it is the world as actions.
The computer is a hand-me-down tool under evolution's glass ceiling. This should be obvious: binary, symbols, metaphors. These are toys (ie they are models), and humans are in our adolescent stage using these toys.
Only analog correlation gets us to agency and thought.
Agency will emerge from exceeding the bottleneck of evolution's hand-me-down tools: binary, symbols, metaphors. As long as these unconscious sportscasters for thought "explain" to us what thought "is", we are trapped. DeepMind is simply another circular hamster wheel of evolution. Just look at the status-propaganda the film heightens in order to justify the magic.
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.
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.
The chatbots and image editors are just a side-show. The real value is coming in e.g. chemistry (Alpha fold etc all), fusion research, weather prediction etc.
The real value is coming in warfare.
None of that has reached the market yet. If it was up to the sciences alone, AI couldn't bear the weight of its own costs.
It also needs to be vertically integrated to make money, otherwise it's a handout to the materials science company. I can't see any of the AI companies stretching themselves that thin. So they give it away for goodwill or good PR.
That's not really true. Commercial weather prediction has reached the market, and a drug (sorry, can't find the new s link) that was found by AI-accelerated drug discovery is now in clinical testing
Why are images and video a complete waste? This makes no sense to me.
Right now the generators aren’t effective but they are definitely stepping stones to something better in the future.
If that future thing produces video, movies and pictures better than anything humanity can produce at a rate faster than we can produce things… how is that a waste?
It can arguably be bad for society but definitely not a waste.
Let me phrase it a bit differently, then: AI generated cats in Ghibli style are a waste, we should definitely do less of that. I did not hold that opinion before the documentary
Education-style infographics and videos are OK.
You might have said the same thing about GPUs for 20 years when they were mostly for games, before they turned out to be essential for AI. All the entertainment use cases were directly funding development of the next generation of computing all along.
DeepMind's new [edit: apparently now old] weather forecast model is similar in architecture to the toys that generate videos of horses addressing Congress or cats wearing sombreros. The technology moves forward and while some of the new applications are not important, other applications of the same technology may be important.
Is it really similar? I was under the impression it's a GNN of a (really dense) polyhedron, not a diffusion model
GenCast is a diffusion model, but it is not the "new" one like I said. Apparently there is another one. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10772
I want to watch it, but at the same time, it’s basically going to be an advert for Google. I’m not sure if I can put up with the uncritical fluff.
I would love to see a real (ie outsider) filmmaker do this - eg an updated ‘Lo and behold’ by Werner Herzog
Where he speaks french
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
Official too.
I first assumed it was a pirated copy uploaded to Youtube that their filters had somehow missed.
Moderators: Please change the link; feels kind of unethical to bait someone into paying for this now. Especially given that the production is most likely paid for by Google itself.
That woulnd't necessarily mean it's not worth the time to watch it though.
In my experience all DeepMind content ends up being a puff piece for Dennis Hassabis. It's like his personal marketing engine lol.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Demis is after all a co-founder and CEO.
Makes it seem that AI is a one-man show while also feeding the hype cycle
Loved this documentary. People complaining - WTFV first.
I find it funny that the YouTube link takes you to the film, but like an hour into it.
Streaming on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
Hard to discount the impact of AlphaFold in science work but submitting this to a number of film festivals like Tribeca seems a bit AI-washing.
AlphaFold is optimization, not thinking. Propaganda 'r us.
Did you watch the documentary? Would probably fare better if you did, because it'd give you the context for the film title.
I'm an hour into it, unconvinced.
The illusion that agency 'emerges' from rules like games, is fundamentally absurd.
This is the foundational illusion of mechanics. It's UFOlogy not science.
Why is it absurd? Because believing that would break some deep delusion humans have about themselves?
Well, two things: it's the last sentence of the film; being on hour into something you're calling propaganda is brave.
Anyways. I thought the documentary was inspiring. Deepmind are the only lab that has historically prioritized science over consumer-facing product (that's changing now, however). I think their work with AlphaFold is commendable.
It's science under the creative boundary of binary/symbols. And as analog thinkers, we should be developing far greater tools than these glass ceilings. And yes, having finished the film, it's far more propagandic than it began as.
Science is exceeding the envelop of paradox, and what I see here is obeying the envelope in order to justify the binary as a path to AGI. It's not a path. The symbol is a bottleneck.
Everything between your years is an electrochemical process. It's all math and there is no "creative boundary." There's plenty to criticize in AI hype that we're going to get to machine intelligence very soon. I suspect a lot of the hype is oriented towards getting favorable treatment from the government if not outright subsidies. But claiming that there are fundamental barriers is a losing bet.
It doesn't happen "btwn ears" and math is an illusion of imprecision. The fundamental barrier is frameworks and computers will not be involved. There will be software obviously. But it will never be computed.
Plenty *commercial* labs frequently prioritized pure science over *immediate* consumer products, but none done so out of charity. Deepmind included.
Your mind emerges from a network of neurons. Machine models are probably far from enabling that kind of emergence, but if what's going on between our ears isn't computation, it's magic.
It's not magic. It's neural syntax. And nothing trapped by computation is occurring. It's not a model, it is the world as actions.
The computer is a hand-me-down tool under evolution's glass ceiling. This should be obvious: binary, symbols, metaphors. These are toys (ie they are models), and humans are in our adolescent stage using these toys.
Only analog correlation gets us to agency and thought.
Is there a fundamental difference between it and true agency/thought? I’m not so sure.
Agency will emerge from exceeding the bottleneck of evolution's hand-me-down tools: binary, symbols, metaphors. As long as these unconscious sportscasters for thought "explain" to us what thought "is", we are trapped. DeepMind is simply another circular hamster wheel of evolution. Just look at the status-propaganda the film heightens in order to justify the magic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203562
what is thinking?
Sharp wave ripples, nested oscillations, cohering at action-syntax. The brain is "about actions" and lacks representations.
Creatively peeling the hyper dimensional space in the scope of simplectic geometry, markhov blanket and helmholtz invariance????