this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Machine Learning
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Meanwhile people discuss how Google wasn't capable of striking back at OpenAI with a good conversational agent, "thus loosing its status as ML behemoth". It's interesting how LLMs bring out accelerationist and xrisk debates of science fiction/fabrication, and at best debates on economy, while research on materials and climate science warms few minds and arts (at least looks so on X/Mastodon/Reddit)
My guess is that people tend to anthropomorphise many things, especially those they don’t really understand. A language model comes across as “smart” because we can converse with it in human ways. Thinking about material discovery is so distant for most that they don’t really grasp impressive and impactful this work can be.
Now, to me what’s happening here is extremely impressive and I’ve been a fan of deepmind their stem related work for a while. Seems like we could see some big acceleration in stem fields over next years, which will arguably have a bigger impact on people their lives than the things LLMs are used for right now.
I agree. I honestly don't see the advantage of LLMs beyond a better Google search response. It needs to be said that ai is so much more than a chat bot.
Google has made significant strides in many meaningful ways that shouldn't be understated.
Alpha* ( or maybe MCTX ) is in my mind one of those advances that is truly bringing us closer to real world improvements. I shouldn't discount GNNs like used here too but I don't think this is their big win like MCTX is yet.
Overall maybe a lot less hype and a lot more real world application is what ai and ml need now.
Engineers comprise 0.06% of US population for example. Managers around 20%. Also, narrow AI systems aren't so fascinating.
I think a lot of people (myself included) don't really think Google fell behind in the ml space but rather didn't manage to capitalize on their own invention.
It's more a business side issue rather than a R&D one.
Also deep mind, although owned by Google is a separate entity.