741–750 of 989 posts
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Looked up LessWrong. Eh, philosophy people, also known for that "Roko's basilisk" meme. I'm gonna pass.
It's a rationalist community, IMHO their methodology of thought leads to much more well-reasoned takes on AI than on HN, where the discussion here is often very emotionally charged or led by wishful thinking. When it comes to AI, LessWrong has been discussing topics for years, that HN has just started to consider, so they are much further along in the philosophical "chain of thought" so to say. LW fully understood an…
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Once upon a time it would've been unthinkable for Google search to become awful and nearly worthless due, in large part, by Google's discretionary choices. Related - interns these days don't seem to have any particular preference for using Google for finding information...
Google search is bad because there aren't any websites anymore. It's not really possible for it to be good.
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That was supposedly 17 years ago, so I was counting it in the good old. It was cutting-edge at the time, then years later PyTorch ate its lunch, which they eventually admitted with TF 2.0.
Jokes aside, I think a lot of the famous Google internals that became public (Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Bazel, Angular), although I heard everyone say they worked so much better inside Google than outside it, had issues. And the Facebook-supported rivals were often just so much more pleasant to work with that you couldn't ignore it. For all else that was bad about Facebook, for a few years they were pretty good at deny…
DeepMind had a generational run as a pure AI research lab. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, protein folding, tensor improvements, weather forecasting, GNoME and so much more. Google leadership saw all this and went “now go generate a multi trillion dollar commercial business and beat OpenAI and Anthropic” and the results were, predictably, failure. Such a shame.
Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?
The company would have ended up like Stack Overflow? I don't think there was an option for them.
So, in last several months, all the prominent names Google lost: Demis Hassabis (technically still with google but these things are usually presented with a spin), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, David Silver, Denny Zhou, Fernando Pereira, Alex Turner And all the prominent names Google gained: NULL Combined with no gemini frontier GA relea…
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This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
> sundar, softly: “we can create a permission working group.” so true. i have attended meetings to decide on meeting topics for the next half.
"But he's the Prime Minister!"
"Indeed he is Bernard. He has his own car, a nice house in London, a place in the country, endless publicity and a pension for life. What more does he want?"
"I think he wants to govern Britain."
"Well stop him, Bernard!"
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This funny post reads surreal, but it may carry some truth: https://x.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273?lang=en
https://xcancel.com/signulll/status/2067446889956430273
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Both are very smart. But Jeff was responsible for a lot more of what is actually used today than Demis. Demis is responsible for a lot more of the hype though ;) I think saying Jeff's contributions were a long time ago must represent some kind of lack of understanding of Jeff's recent contributions. Jeff has still been focused more on infrastructure, and that is just more hidden most of the time. I would say,if i was…
Agree. Demis is very smart, but obviously less humble and more interested in self-promotion. There have been multiple Deepmind documentaries that mythologize the Demis origin story.
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> Hassabis seems to have been pushed aside. Yeah he seemed too reasonable to me, relative to the fervor. Whoever ends up in charge needs to do a lot of frothing to catch up to the ferver that would justify their valuations and investments
Google's capex is to capture the compute purchases from the other labs. The amount they are spending on Gemini is probably shockingly low...and hence researchers leaving for better watered pastures.
IDK, haven't Google been putting Gemini front and centre in pretty much all of their products?
I'm seeing Gemini on my slide decks, Gemini on my e-mails, Gemini on my searches, Gemini on my videoconferences, Gemini on my database query console. My impression was they were doing a Google Plus style attempt to marshal all the company's efforts behind one product.