Demis Hassabis: belief

Transcript context

…It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good. And then the really interesting scientific question is what is it understanding about our world in order to be able to do that? Because if the cynical, take with diffusion models, there’s no way to understands anything. But I don’t think you can generate that kind of video without understanding. And then our own philosophical notion of what it means to understand then is brought to the surface. To what degree do you think Veo 3 understands our world? I think to the extent that it can predict the next frames in a coherent way, that is a form of understanding, not in the anthropomorphic version of, it’s not some kind of deep philosophical understanding of what’s going on, I don’t think these systems have that, but they certainly have modeled enough of the dynamics, put it that way, that they can pretty accurately generate whatever it is, eight seconds of consistent video that by eye, at least at a glance, is quite hard to distinguish what the issues are. And imagine that in two or three more years’ time, that’s the thing I’m thinking about and how incredible that will look given where we’ve come from the early versions of that one or two years ago. And so the rate of progress is incredible. And I think I’m like you is like a lot of people love all of the stand-up comedians and that actually captures a lot of human dynamics very well and body language, but actually the thing I’m most impressed with and fascinated by is the physics behavior, the lighting and materials and liquids. And it’s pretty amazing that it can do that. And I think that shows that it has some notion of at least intuitive physics, how things are supposed to work intuitively, maybe the way that a human child would understand physics, right, as opposed to a PhD student really being able to unpack all the equations. It’s more of an intuitive physics understanding. Well, that intuitive physics understanding, that’s the base layer, that’s the thing people sometimes call a common-sense. It really understands something. I think that really surprised a lot of people. It blows my mind that I just didn’t think it would be possible to generate that level of realism without understanding. There’s this notion that you can only understand the physical world by having an embodied AI system, a robot that interacts with that world. That’s the only way to construct an understanding of that world. But Veo 3 is directly challenging that it feels like.…

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