Well, I’m being polite—I think they probably were not taking AI risk seriously, because journalists & Elon Musk have attributed quotes to them which are the classic Boomer ‘the AIs will replace us and akshully that is a good thing’ take, but few people are as overt as Hanson or Schmidhuber about that these days. But I don’t want to claim they’re like that without at least digging up & double-checking the various quotes, which would take a while. My point is that even if they are taking it seriously, they don’t matter because they’re long since checked out, and the people actually in charge day-to-day, Pichai & Porat, definitely are not. (Risk/safety is as much about day-to-day implementation as it is about any high-level statements.)
Anyway, relevant update here: post-AI-arms-race, DeepMind/Google Brain have been unceremoniously liquidated by Pichai and merged into ‘Google DeepMind’ (discussion), and Hassabis’s statements about ‘Gemini’ have taken on a capabilities tone. Reading the tea leaves of the new positions and speculating wildly, it looks like GB has been blamed for ‘Xeroxizing’ Google and DM nominally the victor, but at the cost of being pressured into turning into a more product-focused division. No sign of the IP/safety-committee. One thing to keep an eye on here will be the DeepMind Companies House filings (mirrors) - is this a fundamental legal change liquidating the original DeepMind corporation, or a rename+funding+responsibilities?
Why do you think this?
Well, I’m being polite—I think they probably were not taking AI risk seriously, because journalists & Elon Musk have attributed quotes to them which are the classic Boomer ‘the AIs will replace us and akshully that is a good thing’ take, but few people are as overt as Hanson or Schmidhuber about that these days. But I don’t want to claim they’re like that without at least digging up & double-checking the various quotes, which would take a while. My point is that even if they are taking it seriously, they don’t matter because they’re long since checked out, and the people actually in charge day-to-day, Pichai & Porat, definitely are not. (Risk/safety is as much about day-to-day implementation as it is about any high-level statements.)
Anyway, relevant update here: post-AI-arms-race, DeepMind/Google Brain have been unceremoniously liquidated by Pichai and merged into ‘Google DeepMind’ (discussion), and Hassabis’s statements about ‘Gemini’ have taken on a capabilities tone. Reading the tea leaves of the new positions and speculating wildly, it looks like GB has been blamed for ‘Xeroxizing’ Google and DM nominally the victor, but at the cost of being pressured into turning into a more product-focused division. No sign of the IP/safety-committee. One thing to keep an eye on here will be the DeepMind Companies House filings (mirrors) - is this a fundamental legal change liquidating the original DeepMind corporation, or a rename+funding+responsibilities?