Publication
Are humans no longer needed? ❔
DeepMind alumnus David Silver raised $1.1 billion to launch a new AI startup, Ineffable Intelligence. An impressive amount will go towards solving a huge task: creating artificial intelligence that can learn without human data.
Are humans no longer needed? ❔
DeepMind alumnus David Silver has raised $1.1 billion to launch a new AI startup, Ineffable Intelligence. That impressive sum will go toward an enormous goal: creating artificial intelligence capable of learning without human-generated data.
For context: DeepMind is an AI research laboratory founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman. It became known for developing AI systems that learn independently through reinforcement learning—learning by interacting with their environment. In 2014, the Evil Corporation bought it for roughly half a billion dollars.
DeepMind’s best-known projects include:
- AlphaGo—the first AI system to defeat a world champion at Go.
- Gemini—Google’s current multimodal AI model.
Headlines like this can make AI seem like rich black soil: stick in a chair leg and an evergreen tree covered in golden apples will grow. That impression is deceptive. You can slap an “AI” label on any toilet, but that will not turn it into a work of art or guarantee successful fundraising. You need a genuinely deep-tech solution with a serious engineering and scientific foundation. And one other small detail: access to the computing infrastructure needed to run it.
It is worth remembering that AI capable of training itself indefinitely is one of the ingredients of the intelligence explosion associated with the technological singularity. Imagine switching on a server with such an AI and letting it improve until it becomes smarter than its creators. What did Jewish folklore warn us about with the Golem? 🤔
With that context in mind, it is even more interesting to watch an eight-year-old film about DeepMind’s early days.
Documentary AlphaGo:
And the follow-up documentary, The Thinking Game: