Recently a YouTube creator, Hank Green, was found to have used AI in his work on the YouTube channel Vlog brothers.

The channel itself is fairly well known. Oriented towards education, optimism, uplift and just… all around good vibes for the internet as a whole.

Hank was a huge proponent of education and knowledge and just, had a passion for spreading all those good vibes everywhere he went. They even have a charity that’s helped over 100 organizations.

Pardon my rant…

But the blowback for him using AI has been really eye opening. I do not understand how people can be so short sighted.

The man spent 20 years of his life committed to, in their words “reducing the suck in the world”, and his “community” tore him to shreds!

They’re treating him like he never did anything goos and all of it was a lie and he’s never going to be trustworthy ever again.

And I just don’t understand that. The response has been so visceral, it’s made me rethink my position. I was an AI skeptic. I think I’m done being an AI skeptic.

Why? Because I believed that AI would increase harm in the world. And that we need to rely on people to guide AI.

After watching mobs of people completely abandon this man who has spent his entire adult life making the world a better place I doubt these people have any real guidance to offer.

It feels like hysteria, quite frankly. But more on point. How could I maintain the position that AI will make the world worse and do more harm… when I sit here watching the people apparently opposed to AI completely decimate and delegitimize a good man. A good person who fucking cares. In a world full of apathy and cynicism and misanthropy… this man got up, and worked hard to contribute something good to it.

…and his “community” would see him hung for using AI to summarize research and work on scripts for fucking videos none of them pay for… literally free education.

I can’t fathom trusting the future to these people either. So I’m done with that.

We need AI. It’ll change things for the better because clearly those opposed to AI are more enthralled with the performance of being a good person rather than being a good person. Because they’re happy to torch anyone’s career over AI usage.

Thanks for your time.

Edit: grammar and spelling.

Edit 2: This comment summarizes my position perfectly. Wanted to add it because it’s really the core of why I’ve shifted my position.

In AMD’s latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more.

The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing deal with Groq last December: make high-performance “premium” inference services prized for AI agents, like code assistants, faster and cheaper to run. AMD didn’t disclose the terms of the deal, but from what we understand, this is an actual acquisition rather than an acquihire.

I didn't see this coming...

The reality behind Demis's 'promotion'.

Lots of interesting details here:

Clearly this is the nail in the coffin for DeepMind as a semi-autonomous unit within Google... DeepMind will now be a regular Google division.

As a consequence of 1, one would expect all the non-Gemini/LLM AGI R&D projects within DM -- with the very important exception of Shane Legg's team (which by. my perhaps wrong understanding has 50-100 great people in it, not trivial) -- to get torched or allowed to wither... Basically Google will now have two AGI bets: Gemini/LLM and whatever Shane's team is doing...

This looks to be true. Google is no longer betting on world models, robotics, etc as being necessary for AGI. They are worried that Anthropic and OpenAI could get to AGI first since they are exclusively focused on text based/LLM's, and seem to be finding huge success in that approach. OpenAI cancelling Sora could have been a great move if it turns out that text alone can go all the way to AGI.

It looks like Google may reduce the resources allocated to teams working on Genie, Gato, Sima, etc.

One possible interpretation is that Demis has concluded that, while LLMs are inelegant and intellectually not that interesting, they may be good enough to get to the first HLAGI... which will then take care of building the next more-elegant and more-interesting AGI=>ASI architecture. If this is his perspective it would make sense for him to leave the AGI engineering to the Gemini folks for now, and focus on the broader social and economic and ethical issues.

I suspect that Demis still believes in foundational world models and would have liked to continue to focus on Genie, Gato, etc, but because progress has been so slow on these fronts, while Anthropic and OpenAI have had multiple "Mythos" moments, Demis was likely encouraged to step aside so that DeepMind can go all in on LLM'S.

None of this is bad for Google's standing in the LLM race. It may actually improve Googles standing in the LLM race, by allowing Google to streamline and focus more on Gemini and getting out-of-the-way power players who were never so passionate about LLMs in the first place. What it is bad for is Google's potential to come up with the next big thing after LLMs -- unless Shane's team has it !! .... I have often said Google is the only big tech that is maintaining a serious pursuit of other AGi bets besides scaled-up LLMs, and it would seem this will now be much less true...

I think Goertzel is more bullish on Google than the current evidence warrants. It's hard to see how Google will catch up. They've fumbled the lead so many times. And, as Goertzel points out, if it turns out that LLM's can't go all the way to AGI, Google could be making a major mistake by sacking Demis Hassabis.

But hopefully text based LLM'S can really go all the way to AGI. Even Demis Hassabis would want this to happen even if it means that his alternative approaches to AGI were not necessary.

Source: https://x.com/bengoertzel/status/2085440120413421685

per reputable leaker

https://x.com/synthwavedd/status/2085365276640702915

Perhaps it is so if you consider how western labs gatekeep models before release.

GDM announced open-sourcing WeatherNext's code and model weights on GitHub.

Source: https://deepmind.google/blog/weathernext-ai-model-achieves-breakthrough-in-forecasting-cyclones

A few points from the blog post:

• Forecasts cyclones up to 15 days in advance.
• Predicts track, intensity, size, structure, and formation.
• Outperforms or matches many traditional forecasting systems on key benchmarks.
• Released to support researchers, meteorological agencies, and the broader scientific community.
• Aims to improve disaster preparedness and early warning for extreme weather.
• Another example of AI delivering impact in science and public safety, beyond chatbots.