The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind Documentary

Greg Kohs and his team are brilliant. For example, the way it captured the emotional triumph of the AlphaFold achievement. And a lot of other things.

One of the smart choices was that it omitted a whole potential discussion about LLMs (VLMs) etc. and the fact that that part of the AI revolution was not invented in that group, and just showed them using/testing it.

One takeaway could be that you could be one of the world's most renowned AI geniuses and not invent the biggest breakthrough (like transformers). But also somewhat interesting is that even though he had been thinking about this for most of his life, the key technology (transformer-type architecture) was not invented until 2017. And they picked it up and adapted it within 3 years of it being invented.

Also I am wondering if John Jumper and/or other members of the should get a little bit more credit for adapting transformers into Evoformer.

Watched it a while ago. Made me seriously think about AI and what we should use it for. I feel like all the entertainment use cases (image and video gen) are a complete waste.

Watched it this week. Pretty good.

There are a couple parts at the start and the end where a lady points her phone camera at stuff and asks an AI about what it sees. Must have been mind-blowing stuff when this section was recorded (2023), but now it's just the bare minimum people expect of their phones.

Crazy times we're living in.

I want to watch it, but at the same time, it’s basically going to be an advert for Google. I’m not sure if I can put up with the uncritical fluff.

I would love to see a real (ie outsider) filmmaker do this - eg an updated ‘Lo and behold’ by Werner Herzog

In my experience all DeepMind content ends up being a puff piece for Dennis Hassabis. It's like his personal marketing engine lol.

reposting this from youtube comment

From 1:14:55-1:15:20, within the span of 25 seconds, the way Demis spoke about releasing all known sequences without a shred of doubt was so amazing to see. There wasn't a single second where he worried about the business side of it (profits, earnings, shareholders, investors) —he just knew it had to be open source for the betterment of the world. Gave me goosebumps. I watched that on repeat for more than 10 times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ

i tried to watch it but like AI in general, it was extraordinarily boring. neural nets are really cool technically, but the whole AI thing is just getting old and I couldnt care less where its going

we can guarantee that whether its the birth of superintelligence or just a very powerful but fundamentally limited algorithm, it will not be used for the betterment of mankind, it will be exploited by the few at the top at the expense of the masses

because thats apparently who we are as a species

I caught it on the airplane a few days ago. I would have loved a little more technical depth, but I guess that's pretty much standard for a puff piece.

It is interesting that Hassabis has had the same goal for almost 20 years now. He has a decent chance of hitting it too.

Just watched it yesterday and enjoyed every second of it, the director put more focus on Demis Hassabis which turns out to be a true superhero and I have to confess that I am probably admiring him more that any other human in the tech industry.

I find it funny that the YouTube link takes you to the film, but like an hour into it.

Loved this documentary. People complaining - WTFV first.

Streaming on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ

Hard to discount the impact of AlphaFold in science work but submitting this to a number of film festivals like Tribeca seems a bit AI-washing.

AlphaFold is optimization, not thinking. Propaganda 'r us.