Demis Hassabis: belief

Transcript context

…The development of Gemini is super interesting because it comes right at the heels of merging these different organizations, Brain and DeepMind. I’m curious, what have been the challenges there? What have been the synergies? It’s been successful in the sense that you have the best model in the world now. What’s that been like? It’s been fantastic actually, over the last year. Of course it’s been challenging to do, like any big integration coming together. You’re talking about two world-class organizations with long, storied histories of inventing many important things from deep reinforcement learning to transformers. So it’s very exciting to actually pool all of that together and collaborate much more closely. We always used to be collaborating, but more on a project-by-project basis versus a much deeper, broader collaboration like we have now. Gemini is the first fruit of that collaboration, including the name Gemini implying twins. Of course, a lot of other things are made more efficient like pooling compute resources together and ideas and engineering. I think at the stage we’re at now, there are huge amounts of world-class engineering that have to go into building the frontier systems. I think it makes sense to coordinate that more. You and Shane started DeepMind partly because you were concerned about safety. You saw AGI coming as a live possibility. Do you think the people who were formerly part of Brain, that half of Google DeepMind now, approach it in the same way? Have there been cultural differences there in terms of that question?…

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