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DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has a chilling warning for Google, his former employer: The internet as we know it will fundamentally change and "old school" Search will be gone in a decade.

"If I was Google I would be pretty worried because that old school system does not look like it's gonna be where we're at in 10 years time," he said during a recent episode of the No Priors podcast.

Suleyman started DeepMind, a pioneering artificial intelligence company, with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, in 2010. Google bought it in 2014, and the firm went on to develop ground-breaking inventions, including AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict protein structures. Suleyman left Google a couple of years ago and co-founded a startup called Inflection AI, which recently launched its first product, a personalized chatbot called Pi.

In 2019, Suleyman switched from DeepMind to a VP role at Google. The move followed an internal investigation at DeepMind into allegations that Suleyman had bullied staff.Insider reported that complaints over Suleyman's behavior had been raised for several years. He has apologized and has said that he "really screwed up."

During his final period at Google, Suleyman worked onLaMDA, a large language model. He said he and other colleagues tried to launch a conversational, interactive product using this model, but couldn't persuade Google.

"It wasn't the right timing for Google for various reasons," he said, laughing ruefully. "And I was just like, you know, this has to be out there in the world. This is going to clearly be the new wave of technology."

"The way I positioned LaMDA at Google is that conversation is the future interface. And Google is already a conversation. It's just an appallingly painful one," Suleyman added.

There's a lot for Google to lose if its search engine is forced to change radically. The company is the gatekeeper to the web, crawling, indexing and ranking millions of sites. It makes almost all its profit from running ads alongside search results. It is now experimenting with its own chatbot, Bard, and weaving some of this technology into Search. But no one really knows how it will make as much money from this new format.

With or without Google, the search experience will evolve to be conversational and interactive, Suleyman said on the No Priors podcast. The has huge ramifications for the future of the web and everyone who relies on it to access information and make a living. Here are more highlights from Suleyman's comments:

You say something to Google, it gives you an answer in 10 blue links. You say something about those 10 blue links by clicking on it. It generates that page. You look at that page. You say something to Google by how long you spend on that page, what you click on, how much you scroll up and down, etc, etc. And then you come back to the Search login and you update your query and you say something again to Google about what you saw. That's a dialog, and Google learns like that, and the problem is, it's using 1980s Yellow Pages to have that conversation. And actually now we can do that conversation in fluent natural language.

And I think the problem with what Google has, I guess in a way accidentally, done to the internet is that it has basically shaped content production in a way that optimizes for ads, and everything is now SEO-ed to within an inch of its life. You go on a web page and all the text has been broken out into sub-bullets, and subheaders, and separated by ads, and you spend 5 to 7 or 10 seconds just scrolling through the page to find the snippet that you actually want. Most of the time you are just looking for a quick snippet. And if you are reading, it's just in this awkward format and that's because if you spend 11 seconds on the page, instead of 5 seconds, that looks like high quality content to Google and it's quote-on-quote engaging. So the content creator is incentivized to keep you on that page, and that's bad for us because what we as humans clearly want is high quality succinct fluent, natural language answers to the questions that we want. And then crucially we want to be able to update our response without thinking how do I change my query? We've learned to speak Google. It's a crazy environment. We've learned to Google. That's just a weird lexicon that we've co-developed with Google over 20 years. No. Now, that has to stop. That's over. That moment is done, and we can now talk to computers in fluent natural language and that is the new interface.

We think that in the next few years everyone is going to have their own personal AI. There are going to be many different types of AI. There will be business AIs, government AIs, nonprofit AIs, political AIs, influencer AIs, brand AIs. All of those AIs are going to have their own objective aligned to their owner. Which is to promote something, sell something, persuade you of something. And my belief is that we all as individuals want our own AIs that are aligned to our own interests and on our team and in our corner. And that's what a personal AI is. And ours is called Pi, personal intelligence. It is there to be your companion. We've started off with a style that is empathetic and supportive and we try to ask ourselves at the beginning what makes for good conversation.

I think it's going to change fundamentally. I think that most computing is going to become a conversation. And a lot of that conversation is going to be facilitated by AIs of various kinds. So your Pi is going to give you a summary of the news in the morning. It's going to help you keep learning about your favorite hobby, whether it's cacti or motorcycles. Every couple of days it's going to send you new updates, new information in a summary snippet that really suits exactly your reading style and your interests and your preference for consuming information. Whereas a website, the traditional open internet just assumes there's a fixed format and that everybody wants a single format. And generative AI clearly shows us that we can make this dynamic and emergent and entirely personalized. If I was Google I would be pretty worried because that old school system does not look like it's gonna be where we're at in 10 years time. It's not going to happen overnight. There's going to be a transition but these kinds of succinct, dynamic personalized interactive moments are clearly the future.

An AI is kind of just a website or an app. Let's say you have a blog about baking. You can still produce super high quality content with your AI and your AI will be a lot more engaging and interactive for other people to talk to. So to me, any brand is already kind of an AI. It's just using static tools. For a couple of hundred years, the ad industry has been using color, shape, texture, text, sound and image to generate meaning. It's just they release a new version every six months or every year. Now, that's going to become much more dynamic, and interactive. So I really don't subscribe to this view that there's going to be 1 or 5 AIs. I think this is completely misguided and fundamentally wrong. There are going to be 100s of millions of AIs or billions of AIs. And there will be a line to individuals. So what we don't want is autonomous AIs that operate completely independently and wander off doing their own thing. That doesn't end well. If your blogger has their own AI that represents their content, then I imagine a world where my Pi will go out and talk to that AI and say yeah my Mustafa is super interested to learn about baking, he can't crack an egg, so where does he need to start? And then Pi will have an interaction and be like oh that was really kind of funny and interesting. Mustafa will really like that. And then Pi will come back to me and be like hey I found this great AI today. Maybe we could set up a conversation, you'll find something super interesting. Or they recorded this little clip of me and the other AI interacting and here's a 3 minute video, or something like that. This will be how new content, I think, gets produced. And I think it will be your AI, your Pi, your personal AI that acts as interlocutor accessing the other world. Which is basically, by the way, what Google does at the moment. Google crawls other essentially AIs that are statically produced by the existing methods and has a little interaction with them, ranks them, and then presents them to you.

Read more here:
DeepMind Cofounder: Old-School Google Search Will Be Gone in a Decade - Business Insider

Governments will have to find a solution for knowledge sector workers whose jobs are automated away thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence, a leading expert in the field warned.

Mustafa Suleyman, who cofounded the London-based lab DeepMind, later sold to Google in 2014, told attendees of the GIC Bridge Forum event in San Francisco on Tuesday that policymakers needed to step up and provide some form of aid, such as universal basic income (UBI).

That needs material compensation, said Suleyman, according to a report by the Financial Times. This is a political and economic measure we have to start talking about in a serious way.

In March, Goldman Sachs argued generative A.I. that can create content almost indistinguishable from a human, like Midjourney and ChatGPT, could leave 300 million full-time workers across the U.S. and Europe out of a job.

Unquestionably, many of the tasks in white-collar land will look very different in the next five to 10 years, Suleyman continued.

The warning from the DeepMind cofounder, who has since gone on to launch a new startup called Inflection with the aid of LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, is not the first from a leading mind in the field of tech.

In March, Elon Musk added his name to Steve Wozniaks and a long list of other distinguished signatories pushing for a delay in advanced A.I. research.

They arguedthat decisions about A.I. must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders and that more powerful systems should only be developed once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, has attempted to assuage concerns about his ChatGPT and DALL-E products, arguing a lot of people will be made very rich by A.I. in the process.

Just how many people could also be made extremely poor is the real question that could prove explosiveparticularly for the two countries that DeepMind effectively calls home: the U.K. and the United States.

Should tens of millions of knowledge sector workers or more lose their job through generative A.I., without any real plan to cushion the blow, the resulting upheaval could prove significantly disruptive.

There are going to be a serious number of losers [that] will be very unhappy, very agitated, warned Suleyman.

Excerpt from:
DeepMind cofounder warns governments seriously need to find solutions for people who lose their jobs to A.I. - Fortune

Google is stuffing powerful new AI tools into tons of its existing products and launching a slew of new ones, including a coding assistant, it announced at its annual I/O conference today.

Billions of users will soon see Googles latest AI language mode, PaLM 2, integrated into over 25 products like Maps, Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and the companys chatbot, Bard. For example, people will be able to simply type a request such as Write a job description into a text box that appears in Google Docs, and the AI language model will generate a text template that users can customize.

Because of safety and reputational risks, Google has been slower than competitors to launch AI-powered products. But fierce competition from competitors Microsoft, OpenAI, and others has left it no choice but to start, says Chirag Shah, a computer science professor at the University of Washington.

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Its a high-risk strategy, given that AI language models have numerous flaws with no known fixes. Embedding them into its products could backfire and run afoul of increasingly hawkish regulators, experts warn.

Google is also opening up access to its ChatGPT competitor, Bard, from a select group in the US and the UK to the general public in over 180 countries. Bard will soon allow people to prompt it using images as well as words, Google said, and the chatbot will be able to reply to queries with pictures. Google is also launching AI tools that let people generate and debug code.

Google has been using AI technology for years in products like text translation and speech recognition. But this is the companys biggest push yet to integrate the latest wave of AI technology into a variety of products.

[AI language models] capabilities are getting better. Were finding more and more places where we can integrate them into our existing products, and were also finding real opportunities to provide value to people in a bold but responsible way, Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of Google DeepMind, told MIT Technology Review.

This moment for Google is really a moment where we are seeing the power of putting AI in peoples hands, he says.

The hope, Ghahramani says, is that people will get so used to these tools that they will become an unremarkable part of day-to-day life.

Googles announcement comes as rivals like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta and open-source groups like Stability.AI compete to launch impressive AI tools that can summarize text, fluently answer peoples queries, and even produce images and videos from word prompts.

With this updated suite of AI-powered products and features, Google is targeting not only individuals but also startups, developers, and companies that might be willing to pay for access to models, coding assistance, and enterprise software, says Shah.

Its very important for Google to be that one-stop shop, he says.

Google is making new features and models available that harness its AI language technology as a coding assistant, allowing people to generate and complete code and converse with a chatbot to get help with debugging and code-related questions.

The trouble is that the sorts of large language models Google is embedding in its products are prone to making things up. Google experienced this firsthand when it originally announced it was launching Bard as a trial in the US and the UK. Its own advertising for the bot contained a factual error, an embarrassment that wiped billions off the companys stock price.

Google faces a trade-off between releasing new, exciting AI products and doing scientific research that would make its technology reproducible and allow external researchers to audit it and test it for safety, says Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at AI startup Hugging Face.

In the past, Google has taken a more open approach and has open-sourced its language models, such as BERT in 2018. But because of the pressure from the market and from OpenAI, theyre shifting all that, Luccioni says.

The risk with code generation is that users will not be skilled enough at programming to spot any errors introduced by AI, says Luccioni. That could lead to buggy code and broken software. There is also a risk of things going wrong when AI language models start giving advice on life in the real world, she adds.

Even Ghahramani warns that businesses should be careful about what they choose to use these tools for, and he urges them to check the results thoroughly rather than just blindly trusting them.

These models are very powerful. If they generate things that are flawed, then with software you have to be concerned about whether you just take the generated output and incorporate it into your mission-critical software, he says.

But there are risks associated with AI language models that even the most up-to-date and tech-savvy people have barely begun to understand. It is hard to detect when text and, increasingly, images are AI generated, which could allow these tools to be used for disinformation or scamming on a large scale.

The models are easy to jailbreak so that they violate their own policies against, for example, giving people instructions to do something illegal. They are also vulnerable to attacks from hackers when integrated into products that browse the web, and there is no known fix for that problem.

Ghahramani says Google does regular tests to improve the safety of its models and has built in controls to prevent people from generating toxic content. But he admits that it still hasnt solved that vulnerabilitynor the problem of hallucination, in which chatbots confidently generate nonsense.

Going all in on generative AI could backfire on Google. Tech companies are currently facing heightened scrutiny from regulators over their AI products. The EU is finalizing its first AI regulation, the AI Act, while in the US, the White House recently summoned leaders from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI to discuss the need to develop AI responsibly. US federal agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, have signaled that they are paying more attention to the harm AI can cause.

Shah says that if some of the AI-related fears do end up panning out, it could give regulators or lawmakers grounds for action with the teeth to actually hold Google accountable.

But in a fight to retain its grip on the enterprise software market, Google feels it cant risk losing out to its rivals, Shah believes. This is the war they created, he says. And at the moment, theres very little to nothing to stop them.

See the original post here:
Google is throwing generative AI at everything - MIT Technology Review

Nowadays,Scorpio is ruled by Pluto, but back in the Hellenistic astrology days, it was actually ruled by Mars. That said, Mars feels right at home in Scorpio, and it makes senseScorpio is the sign that rules sex, and Mars is definitely a passionate planet.

Then take Pluto, the planet of transformation and rebirth, and we start to get a clear picture on how having a Scorpio Mars results in intensity and unmatched depth.

As astrologerDesiree Roby Antilapreviously told mindbodygreen, folks with Mars in Scorpio are relentless, with an ability to get through, around, over, and under any obstacle. "They have a really strong drive, but again, they're fixed, so whenever Mars is in a fixed sign, it tends to make the person pretty stubborn," she notes.

This can look like having a hard time letting things go, holding grudges, being vengeful, etc., which is telltale Scorpio energy. They also have a tendency to push themselves to the point of burnout, which is something to watch out for.

And according to astrologerMolly Pennington, Ph.D., a Scorpio Mars placement will likely fly under the radar with an air of mystery. "People might just walk up to them not knowing that they're dealing with a Scorpionand it's about to sting," she explains.

This is all part of the Scorpio Mars strategy of protecting and guarding itself against vulnerability. "They have this deep, emotional side, almost like wars of the heart that are deep down underneath it all," Pennington says, adding that those wars are often long lasting, and they bring a "battlefield" mindset into all areas of their life.

Take Taylor Swift as a classic example of Scorpio Mars energy. She has a Scorpio Mars, and her insistence on rerecording all of her music to get the rights under her own name is a prime example of this placement's willingness to win at any cost.

Excerpt from:
Mars In Scorpio: What This Astrological Placement Really Means ... - mindbodygreen