> “I would advocate developing these types of AGI technologies in a cautious manner using the scientific method, where you try and do very careful controlled experiments to understand what the underlying system does,” Mr. Hassabis said.
Myabe that's why Google was (seemingly) left in the dust?
I'm not following synthetic data closely (I've used it to train models before) but I see a bright future for this space (like game engines used to simulate big worlds simply to generate data or training in said worlds and transfering).
It seems that Google have certainly been cautious about releasing this type of tech, but again hard to tell the exact mix of motivations - e.g. safety vs business risks. Almost all the authors of the Transformer paper have since left Google, and it seems a common theme is that they all thought Google was under-utilizing the tech - maybe just not knowing what to do with it as much as being worried about it ?
It seems things are now changing at Google, with the Brain + DeepMind merger and what appears to be a new productization focus. It seems competition may now be trumping safety concerns, even if they are still paying lip service to it!