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TaylorAlexanderHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

If they kill R&D now to focus on productizing something that is half baked, they will fail to …

… If they kill R&D now to focus on productizing something that is half baked, they will fail to develop those new inventions which might get us to AGI. When I worked at Google X Robotics I was hired on to the remnants of the last research team, which was dissolved six months after I started (I was moved to hardware test engineer). Our subteam really wanted to research multi-finger grippers but we got overruled, so the robot had to do everything with a two finger pinch gripper. Which is fine for research but absolutely unsuitable for real world tasks. It couldn’t even operate a spray bottle without special attachments and they thought it was going to clean people’s homes! [1] I am sharing this one a lot lately but I’m very moved by Yann LeCun’s arguments about the limits of autoregressive approaches here. As a robotics engineer I have been dismayed at all the attention LLMs are getting despite serious limitations that make them generally unsuitable to solve some of the most important problems in robotics. https://youtu.be/1lHFUR-yD6I

Original discussionGoogle DeepMind shifts from research lab to AI product factory138 source comments · at import
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astromaniakHN

I'm afraid this is going to be another Everyday Robots or Boston Dynamics. Google is ruled by managers, not visionaries. Strategy is 'try and see if it works in 4 years. if not cancel'. They followed it in many cases. So, DeepMind's cancellation is long overdue. A couple of years back one of Google's top managers talking about AGI said it's most likely to happen in DM. But current LLM boom happened elsewhere. Likely managers are disappointed in DM.

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ignoramousHN

btw, Sustkever is on record that Transformers are enough to achieve AGI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW0SLbtGMcg&t=33s

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robertlagrantHN

> my fear is that the managers have FOMO and want to push to productize asap even tho the tech isn’t ready yet This is exactly it. With the limitations ChatGPT is encountering around safety and hallucination, Google probably should've just said "we're working on something awesome - hold on" and kept plugging away before releasing, instead of ex-Product CEO making them release something now, even if half of the demo video is fake.

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golergkaHN

I'm using chatGPT to Google something for around a year (or whenever bing browsing became available), and I'm yet to set a single hallucination based on web search results. May be Google is just not very good at this.

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