Credit: Kai Wenzel on Unsplash “This is a critical moment to ensure we build AGI safely and its benefits to society far outweigh any risks,” wrote the three directors of the new DeepMind Institute. Google DeepMind has launched the DeepMind Institute, or DMI, a platform for research and debate on artificial general intelligence, according to its launch essay. Its directors are Shane Legg, co-founder and Chief AGI Scientist at Google DeepMind, and Demis Hassabis, the lab’s co-founder and chair. Hassabis is also Alphabet’s chief scientist.
The third director is James Manyika, Google’s president of research, labs, technology and society. Legg is also the managing editor. The institute says its pieces reflect their authors’ ideas and “should not be read as Google’s official view.” What the institute says The launch essay defines AGI as a system that shows all the cognitive capabilities of the human brain. It says today’s systems still fail at some basic tasks, but “we expect those gaps to be closed soon.” It names cybersecurity and biorisks as current concerns, and “the potential for loss of control in future self-improving systems.” In August, a DeepMind executive tied AI spending to machines that improve themselves.
Researchers from Google DeepMind, Google and the wider research community will publish on the platform. The essay says they “will not always agree.” “Worth considering” Legg told the Financial Times that AI capabilities must not outrun safety controls. He called Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s call to slow, but not pause, frontier model releases “interesting directionally” and “worth considering.” Amodei said on 12 September that the industry must slow down. Legg also told the FT it was premature to declare that AGI had been achieved.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said AGI has arrived on 7 September. OpenAI made its own AGI claim on 4 September. Legg remains “comfortable” with his forecast of a 50% chance of “minimal” AGI by 2028, the FT reported. Bilal Chughtai, who left DeepMind’s AGI safety team in July, posted a warning this week.
The first essays Alongside the launch essay, the site lists four pieces: “The case for reasoning transparency”, by Rohin Shah and Anca Dragan “Economic policy for AGI”, by Julian Jacobs and Alex Imas “Principles for a new utopianism”, by Stephen Cave “A framework for frontier AI and the dawning of a new age”, by Hassabis Eleven policies for an AGI economy Jacobs, an economist and research scientist at Google DeepMind, and Imas, its Director of AGI Economics, rated 11 policies in their essay. They used literature reviews, surveys and 51 AI agent raters built from survey data on 51 real economists. The authors write that “no single initiative is the answer to everything.” They match three “least-regret” responses to three scenarios: Mild disruption: expanded unemployment insurance, a wider Earned Income Tax Credit and employer-led retraining Moderate displacement: turning the tax credit into a negative income tax Labour and capital decoupling: a universal basic capital backstop, used if labour’s share of GDP falls for a sustained period They call universal basic income “an expensive and blunt instrument that may fail to concentrate sufficient relief where it is needed most.” In their survey, 85% of Americans backed publicly funded retraining and 72% backed unemployment insurance. Support for universal basic capital was 54%.
Universal basic capital scored highest of the 11 policies on agency, at 76.3 out of 100. It scored 33.1 on feasibility, second lowest after a federal jobs guarantee. Also tagged with
Leave a Reply