The word "institute" gives an aura of credibility without some boring accreditation. Though not sure every country allows that.

My read is that they're criticizing moving the reasoning (more) into the latent space, such that not even researchers/safety-evaluators can actually see what's going on.

Of course this still then has a 'trust me, bro' feel to it, but making it outright impossible to reasonably inspect the CoT is a significantly larger and riskier step, IMO.

So, a think tank, to lobby governments

We created this institute precisely because broad-based intellectual discussion and debate are required to arrive at a consensus about how to address the challenges and opportunities we face as a society.

Something tells me that consensus will never arrive to the conclusion that we should shut down that whole industry

How can they even pretend to distance themselves from Google…

What happened to the knowledge in the elder's mind when they died, prior to writing? What changed about that once we had writing?

I'm not actually sure how you could come to that conclusion.

Maybe you need to learn more about the language uplift.

politics

So, like ARC-AGI-3? I'm sympathetic to the notion that the things we're able to measure are necessarily going to miss important aspects of capability and intelligence. But people are attempting to measure this kind of thing, and models keep getting better at it.

They are simply looking to steer AI policy discussions. It's basically an in-house think tank.

For a guy who spent his life imagining and realising dreams in video games and cognitive abilities in artificial neural networks, it has to be very soul destroying for Demis to spend his time doing something as frivolous as this.

maybe if AI was progressing linearly we wouldn't be close, but if it's progressing exponentially then all bets are off

wow i thought the attributions were for the vector graphic things and was like "ok demis is in his illustrator bag too!"

Just a new shop front. Nothing to see here.

I wonder if they could make the font even greyer on that website. MORE GREY because I am still able to read it (bearly).

Google citing Mark Fisher was not on my Postmodern-hell-world bingo card.

Here's my opinion on the "pacing the frontier" issue. Recursive self improvement can accelerate AI advances a lot. Whoever nails it first, has a huge first mover's advantage. But OpenAI is taking a "move fast and break things" attitude. This is making life very difficult for Anthropic: how can you retain your edge when you keep measuring twice to cut once, but your competitor keeps blowing things up left and right?

Google, who was left a little bit behind anyway, is more than happy to join the calls for taking a more cautious approach to AI development. Hence DeepMind Institute.

Sam Altman has no option than to pretend he agrees with all these ideas. What else is he supposed to say?

Their economic policy article is quite good:

- need for faster, better and more accurate measurements of the things we care about

- 3 scenarios of impact ranging from mild to major disruption

- mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit

- major disruption policies are also pretty logical, emphasizing owning a share of the profits of AI

- AI evaluators to sort and weigh the policies for their effectiveness

It looks like to me a lot of thinking, research, and work put into the piece.

I know people will gripe at using AI evaluators to score and weigh policies for effectiveness but if you read any amount of research papers, they do researcher evaluated scoring, which translates to "me, a 26 year old PHD candidate who hasn't held a job yet, and my roommate who stayed up all night with me to tell me his vibes on the subject".

It is IMO wrong and lazy to dismiss these pieces as being the same level as Dario or Sam's blog posts / speeches / call to actions, these are actual research papers.