The DeepMind Institute

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.

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...

Does anyone have any idea why most of today’s top links are submitted by the same account, one that is 11 days old?

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.

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

> 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.

I wonder if they could make the font even greyer on that website. MORE GREY because I am still able to read it (bearly).

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?

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.

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

so glad they spun out a non-profit!

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.

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

Just a new shop front. Nothing to see here.

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