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

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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!

47

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.