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.

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.

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.

Practical things are probably treating diseases and more abundance of physical goods. More speculative/sci-fi is merging in some form with AI and maybe immortality which I think is the more interesting bit.

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.

Another way to interpret this (and I don't mean it pejoratively at all): Demis has been optimizing his chances for winning a nobel prize for quite some time now. Releasing the data increased that chance. He also would have been fairly certain that the commercial value of the predictions was fairly low (simply predicting structures accurately was never the rate-limiting step for downstream things like drug discovery). And that he and his team would have a commercial advantage by developing better proprietary models using them to make discoveries.

I also noticed this as well. Actually went back and watched it several times. It's an incredible moment. I keep thinking, "if this moment is real, this is truly a special person."

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Demis is after all a co-founder and CEO.

It was directed by Greg Kohs, who is a real filmmaker and does not work for Google.

It's an advert for Demis Hassabis, not Google.

Where he speaks french

It's official too. It's on: https://www.youtube.com/@googledeepmind

Moderators: Please change the link; feels kind of unethical to bait someone into paying for this now.

Hi, I’m genuinely curious about your writing style. I’m seeing this trend of no proper casing and no punctuation becoming vogue-ish. Is there a particular reason you prefer to write this way or is this writing style typical for a generation? Sincere question, not snark, coming from an older generation guy.

If you watch on there's a bit where they decide to give away all the protein folding results for free when they could have charged (https://youtu.be/d95J8yzvjbQ?t=4497). Not everything is exploitation rather than the betterment of mankind.

Correct! I’m glad people are finally starting to get it

Yes, it made me think I'd already watched it and had forgotten about it...

Did you watch the documentary? Would probably fare better if you did, because it'd give you the context for the film title.

Not sure why this is downvoted. The comment cuts to the core of the "Intelligence vs. Curve-Fitting" debate. From my humble perspective as a PhD in the molecular biology /biophysics field you are fundamentally correct: AlphaFold is optimization (curve-fitting), not thinking. But calling it "propaganda" might be a slight oversimplification of why that optimization is useful. If you ask AlphaFold to predict a protein that violates the laws of physics (e.g. a designed sequence with impossible steric clashes), it will sometimes still confidently predict a folded structure because it is optimizing for "looking like a protein", not for "obeying physics". The "Propaganda" label likely comes from DeepMind's marketing, which uses words like "Solved"; instead, DeepMind found a way to bypass the protein folding problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

what is thinking?