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In April, Google Brain and DeepMind joined forces as Google DeepMind, with plans to address the competitive threat of OpenAI and its groundbreaking ChatGPT. Now, according to WiredDemis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, says the company is working on a new system, Gemini – which was teased at Google I/O in May – that will “tap into techniques that helped AlphaGo beat a Go champion in 2016.”
According to the report, Hassabis said the Gemini system will combine LLM technology with reinforcement learning techniques used in AlphaGo, aiming to give it new planning and problem-solving capabilities.
Another recent report from The Information quoted an anonymous source said that Google’s researchers used YouTube (which Google owns) to develop Gemini – which AI practitioners say could be an advantage for GoogleDeepMind, as it can get “more complete access to the video data than rivals that use the scraping videos” .”
At Google I/O, CEO Sundar Pichai noted in a blog post that Gemini, the company’s “next-generation base model,” is still in training.
“Gemini was built from the ground up to be multi-modal, highly efficient in tool and API integrations, and built to enable future innovations such as memory and scheduling,” he wrote. “Although we are still early days, we are already seeing impressive multi-modal capabilities that previous models lacked. Once Gemini has been fine-tuned and thoroughly tested for safety, it will be available in a variety of sizes and options.”
The reports about Gemini come after Hassabis himself expressed concern about the long-term existential risks of AI. In the Wired report, Hassabis says no one really knows for sure that AI will become a major threat, but if progress continues at its current pace, there won’t be much time to develop security measures. “I can see the kind of things we build in the Gemini series, and we have no reason to believe they won’t work,” he said.
But Hassabis was also one of the most prominent signatories of the AI risk statementwho warned of a “risk of extinction” of advanced AI if its development is not managed properly.
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