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Comment by querez | Hacker News Reader

> honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know.

I'm pretty sure Google Brain was exactly what you are looking for: People like to think of DeepMind, but honestly, Brain pretty much had Bell Labs/PARCs strategy: they hired a bunch of brilliant people and told them to just "research whatever is you think is cool". And think all the AI innovations that came out of Brain and were given to the world for free: Transformers, Vision Transformers, Diffusion Models, BERT (I'd consider that the first public LLM), Adam, and a gazillion of other cool stuff I can't think of right now.... Essentially, all of the current AI/LLM craze started at Brain.

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Yes, it was basic research( guided to the field of machine learning), but between a search monopoly and their autonomous car project, they definitely have a great economic engine to use that basic research and the talent it pulled into Google, even if a lot of it escaped.

Right. And I'm sure that if I ever get in a better mood, I'll find that the current AI/LLM craze is good for _something_.

Right now the world needs GWh batteries made of salt, cheap fusion from trash, telepathy, a cure for cancer and a vaccine for the common cold - but in the meantime, advertisers can generate photos for their ads, which is, _good_, I guess ?

Can't you get telepathy from training AI on functional MRI data? And then finding a way to pinpoint and activate brain regions remotely?

I mean brain-machine interfaces have been improving for quite a while.

Telepathy might even already exist.

Indeed. Come to think of it, telepathy would bring chaos to society, ruin everyone's life, and open considerable advertising space - it's way more likely to be invented soon than a vaccine for the common cold.

“Want to remember a long lost cherished moment with a now deceased loved one? Think about this product for 15 seconds first.” I’m positive it’s being worked on.

Rolling back the 1980s neoliberal cultural ideals of letting markets and profits be the highest arbiter of societal direction is the key.

Silicon Valley hippies have been replaced by folks focussed on monetisation and growth.

It’s not great for the west, but those problems are being tackled. We just don’t get to read about it because ‘China bad’ and the fear of what capital flight might do to arguably inflated US stock prices

https://www.energy-storage.news/byd-launches-sodium-ion-grid...

It does sound like you're in a particularly bad mood, so yes, maybe our outlook does change. Maybe it helps to think of a darker timeline where Google would have kept all of these advances to itself and improved its ad revenue. Instead it shared the research freely with the world. And call me naive, but I use LLMs almost daily, so there definitely _is_ something of value that came out of all this progress. But YMMV, of course.

I would love to find a way llms could help me right now.

"Hey, xchatgclaudma, please conjure up time and energy out of thin air ?"

Current LLMs seem to be OK code generators when constrained well. I'm building a product with my hands tied behind my back when I only use Claude. Its... working.

Once we get superintelligence — some time next year I’d say — then we will have a tool to make all those dreams come true.

What are you basing such a bold prediction on?

It's not bold if the comment author lives in a state that switched clocks to EPT (Elon-Prediction-Time) this week-end.

For instance, ARC prize now at human level… https://x.com/akyurekekin/status/1855680785715478546

I dont know why it seems bold. So many signs.

https://x.com/anthonynaguirre/status/1861893538532991096?s=4...

Your problem stems from assuming our natural state is some Star Trek utopia, and only our distraction by paraphernalia is preventing us from reaching such a place. Like we are temporarily (temporally?) embarrassed ascended beings.

Humanity’s natural state is abject poverty and strife. Look at any wealth graph of human history and note how people are destitute right up until the Industrial Revolution, and then the graph explodes upward.

In a way we (well, especially the West) are already living in utopia. You’re completely right that we can still vastly improve, but look back at the progress we already made!

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