The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary

The real value is coming in warfare.

None of that has reached the market yet. If it was up to the sciences alone, AI couldn't bear the weight of its own costs.

It also needs to be vertically integrated to make money, otherwise it's a handout to the materials science company. I can't see any of the AI companies stretching themselves that thin. So they give it away for goodwill or good PR.

ML is used in weather prediction since the 80s and is the backbone of it since almost a decade.

Not sure what are LLMs supposed to do there.

It might be shocking to you but some people believe there is more to life than producing and consuming "content" faster and faster.

Most of it is used to fool people for engagement, scam, politics or propaganda, it definitely is a huge waste of resource, time, brain and compute power. You have to be completely brainwashed by consumerism and techsolutionism to not see it

Let me phrase it a bit differently, then: AI generated cats in Ghibli style are a waste, we should definitely do less of that. I did not hold that opinion before the documentary

Education-style infographics and videos are OK.

Parent said "entertainment use cases" are a complete waste, not all uses of images and video. I don't agree, but do particularly find educational use cases of AI video are becoming compelling.

I help people turn wire rolling shelf racks into the base of their home studio, and AI can now create a "how to attach something to a wire shelf rack" without me having to do all the space and rack and equipment and lighting and video setup, and just use a prompt. It's not close to perfect yet, but it's becoming useful.

Is it really similar? I was under the impression it's a GNN of a (really dense) polyhedron, not a diffusion model

Also since selling Deepmind to Google, it's Google's shareholder's money really.

I think that's a rather conspiratorial way of framing it.

I think it's more about someone trying to do the most good that was possible at that time.

I doubt he cares much about prizes or money at this point.

(as an aside, this is a common thing that comes up when you have a good model: do you make a server that allows people to do one-off or small-scale predictions, or do you take a whole query set and run it in batch and save the results in a database; this comes up a lot)

Good catch but it was just an honest typo.

Makes it seem that AI is a one-man show while also feeding the hype cycle

Yeah I don’t mean to say they’re not a real filmmaker or untalented etc, I mean more the context they’re doing it. That they’ve chosen to cover this topic themselves, and that they would show critical angles of it and not just promo + hagiography

Are you saying this movie production wasn't paid for by Google? If it was, surely he did?

This is the writing style of this generation. I've just scrolled 6 months of my conversation with a friend in his twenties. Not a single comma or period to be seen. I mean on his side.

it signals high status and nonconformity. the reader intuits that a sigma male is speaking and he doesnt play by the rules. hes not bound by the constraints and regulations of classical reality. hes dangerous

but seriously, its just more comfortable to type. apostrophes and capitals are generally superfluous, we'll and well the only edge case, theyve, theyll, wont, dont etc its just not necessary. theres no ambiguity

i only recently started using full stops for breaks. for years, I was only using commas, but full stops are trending among the right people. but only for breaks, not for closing

If you grew up in the internet of early 2000s, that's how we wrote online.

that sort of mentality is typical in researchers, but the powers that be will be thinking about profit and control, mass layoffs and AI governance in conjunction with digital id, carbon credits etc

every technological advancement that made people more productive and should have led to them having to do less work, only led to people needing to do more work to survive. i just dont see AI being any different

weekends are always better on hn

I'm an hour into it, unconvinced.

The illusion that agency 'emerges' from rules like games, is fundamentally absurd.

This is the foundational illusion of mechanics. It's UFOlogy not science.

Didn’t the transformer model come from AlphaFold? I feel like we wouldn’t have had the LLMs we use today if it wasn’t for AlphaFold.

If there's one thing I wish DeepMind did less of, it's conflating the protein folding problem with static structure prediction. The former is a grand challenge problem that remains 'unsolved' while the latter is an impressive achievment that really is optimization using a huge collection of prior knowledge. I've told John Moult, the organizer of CASP this (I used to "compete" in these things), and I think most people know he's overstating the significance of static structure prediction.

Also, solving the protein folding problem (or getting to 100% accuracy on structure prediction) would not really move the needle in terms of curing diseases. These sorts of simplifications are great if you're trying to inspire students into a field of science, but get in the way when you are actually trying to rationally allocate a research budget for drug discovery.

It seems that to solve the protein folding problem in a fundamental way would require solving chemistry, yet the big lie (or false hope) of reductionism is that discovering the fundamental laws of the universe such as quantum theory doesn't in fact help that much with figuring out the laws/dynamics at higher levels of abstraction such as chemistry.

So, in the meantime (or perhaps for ever), we look for patterns rather than laws, with neural nets being one of the best tools we have available to do this.

Of course ANNs need massive amounts of data to "generalize" well, while protein folding only had a small amount available due to the months of effort needed to experimentally discover how any protein is folded, so DeepMind threw the kitchen sink at the problem, apparently using a diffusion like process in AlphaFold 3 to first determine large scale structure then refine it, and using co-evolution of proteins as another source of data to address the paucity.

So, OK, they found a way around our lack of knowledge of chemistry and managed to get an extremely useful result all the same. The movie, propaganda or not, never suggested anything different, and "at least 90% correct" was always the level at which it was understood the result would be useful, even if 100% based on having solved chemistry / molecular geometry would be better.

I'm concerned that coders and the general public will confuse optimization with intelligence. That's the nature of propaganda, substituting sleight of hand to create a false narrative.

btw an excellent explanation, thank you.

I think if you watch the actual film you'd find they don't claim AlphaFold is thinking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203562

Sharp wave ripples, nested oscillations, cohering at action-syntax. The brain is "about actions" and lacks representations.

Creatively peeling the hyper dimensional space in the scope of simplectic geometry, markhov blanket and helmholtz invariance????