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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

Must feel pretty bad being a rank and file dev at DeepMind and realizing that your leads had all the talent and funding in the world that they could have used for building language model products and instead they heavily invested in solving board games.

Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.

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The human in the loop reinforcement learning paper that powered chatgpt's training arose from deepmind's experiments with boardgames (and games). AGI is still an unsolved problem and deep RL that arose from the success of deepmind's experiments wth boardgames and games so far, will likely play a huge part in it

Like Bell Labs of old, Google has excellent AI researchers but they haven't built many (any?) AI products people can use.

Search? Gmail completing your emails? They have lots of AI products, they just wait until they are more solid before releasing stuff. Now they will rush out a competitor to ChatGPT before it is ready, but they would use it for something given time.

Don't forget translate!

Board games have been used in AI since the beginning. They provide a good environment as we know the rules and control them. Also as everybody uses them it is easier to compare different algorithms. Most advances in AI were done in board games. Most probably chatGPT uses lot of those things you think are irrelevant in board games (reinforcement learning for fine tuning the responses with human feedback, same algorithms used in board games).

If chess was interesting enough for Ken Thompson to work on, that's good enough for me.

Google researchers invented Transformers and Deepmind pioneered reinforcement learning.

Deepmind did not pioneer reinforcement learning. In fact it wasn’t even the first place to use neural networks for feature representation in RL. That was achieved with Backgammon in the 90s.

Games offer clear perimeters and have lotsa depth to them.

Humans are also trained in games when young, and even into adulthood, think war games that are held semi-annually between countries.

These are just board games with increased stakes and additional variables.

"board games"

ie. Chess and Go. Go a couple of thousand years old, and Chess in particular a core element of AI research history.

Language model research is cool, but you should perhaps consider expanding your horizons beyond the latest headlines in AI.

They also do work with the UK National Health Service.

I have heard (high level sources, unconfirmed publicly) the YouTube algorithm that promotes open mouth creator with $$$$ signs thumbnails is based on their ground breaking research from this collaboration.

Not since 2018: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/13/18091774/google-deepmind...

They have their own LLMs such as PaLM

why they dont make public apps?(at least)

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