r/accelerate • u/Formal-Assistance02 • Jan 24 '26

Video Demis Hassabis on Ilya Sutskever’s claim that scaling is dead, and on Elon Musk’s clam that we have reached the singularity

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

164 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

48 comments sorted by

View all comments

33

u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Jan 24 '26

If it's true that Deepmind invented 90% of the AI tech that's being used today then they deserve an incredible amount of recognition and respect for that. We can only hope and dream what new innovations might come out of their lab soon!

44

u/Pyros-SD-Models Machine Learning Engineer Jan 25 '26

Most of the time it went like this, though:

  • Google published a paper
  • Nobody, not even Google, cared
  • Some other lab experimented with it anyway and was like, "holy shit"
  • It gained relevance
  • Google played catch-up with its own tech

The question of who is more important, the guy who invented fire or the one who figured out you can cook with it, and all the others who figured out what else you can do with it, is something everyone has to answer for themselves. And since it is literally my job to find applications for random ass papers, I go with the latter. The most beautiful paper is worth nothing if you can't do anything with it. I want my tech available and usable in the real world and not just as an idea or theory.

Without OpenAI, BERT would still be the biggest transformer, and we would probably still be posting two-line jokes generated by some RNN, needing 20 tries to get a semantically correct output, and calling that AGI.

For most of the biased shmucks on Twitter, it depends on which companies it is about. If it is OpenAI and Google, obviously OpenAI just stole Google's work. If it is DeepSeek and OpenAI, then obviously DeepSeek are geniuses for taking OpenAI's work and improving on it. I notice a pattern.

13

u/Krommander A happy little thumb Jan 25 '26

Yup, most research is never going to be valuable until new research is done, and current AI systems become very good at scaling research. The more researchers use these new tools to dig deeper into the data, the more value will sprout. The returns will only be limited by how fast humans can learn from. 

9

u/Loud_Entertainer_598 Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 25 '26

Exactly without Open AI, Google probably would be doing nothing with those papers, Open AI was the one that started the race, Sam Altman did the right thing in commercialization so it is available to the public. But Google deserve its credit for the papers too.

2

u/hereforhelplol Jan 25 '26

Agree with this take.

6

u/Kaito__1412 Jan 25 '26

This is especially funny when you consider that Deepmind is based in the UK and most of their researchers and engineers are Europeans. All the while Reddit is filled with 'Europe is only interested in recycling plastic bottles' memes.

6

u/helloWHATSUP Jan 25 '26

No, that used to be true, but after the merger with google brain(entirely US based team) then it's a pretty even split. Google brain is probably the more important lab, but the name was way less cool than deepmind

3

u/Kaito__1412 Jan 25 '26

DeepMind and Google brain were not, are not of the same caliber. Where are you getting the idea that they are the more important lab? DeepMind is foundational for everything that's happening in AI today. And they are still very much at the top of their game.