Google DeepMind’s CEO Says Its Next Algorithm Will Eclipse ChatGPT

From Wired.com (June 26):

IN 2016, AN artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo from Google’s DeepMind AI lab made history by defeating a champion player of the board game Go. Now Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s cofounder and CEO, says his engineers are using techniques from AlphaGo to make an AI system dubbed Gemini that will be more capable than that behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

DeepMind’s Gemini, which is still in development, is a large language model that works with text and is similar in nature to GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT. But Hassabis says his team will combine that technology with techniques used in AlphaGo, aiming to give the system new capabilities such as planning or the ability to solve problems.

“At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models,” Hassabis says. “We also have some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting.” Gemini was first teased at Google's developer conference last month, when the company announced a raft of new AI projects.

AlphaGo was based on a technique DeepMind has pioneered called reinforcement learning, in which software learns to take on tough problems that require choosing what actions to take like in Go or video games by making repeated attempts and receiving feedback on its performance. It also used a method called tree search to explore and remember possible moves on the board. The next big leap for language models may involve them performing more tasks on the internet and on computers.

Gemini is still in development, a process that will take a number of months, Hassabis says. It could cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, said in April that creating GPT-4 cost more than $100 million.

Playing Catch-Up

When Gemini is complete it could play a major role in Google’s response to the competitive threat posed by ChatGPT and other generative AI technology. The search company pioneered many techniques that enabled the recent torrent of new AI ideas but chose to develop and deploy products based on them cautiously.

Since ChatGPT’s debut Google has rushed out its own chatbot, Bard, and put generative AI into its search engine and many other products. To juice up AI research the company in April combined Hassabis’ unit DeepMind with Google’s primary AI lab, Brain, to create Google DeepMind. Hassabis says the new team will bring together two powerhouses that have been foundational to the recent AI progress. “If you look at where we are in AI, I would argue that 80 or 90 percent of the innovations come from one or the other,” Hassabis says. “There are brilliant things that have been done by both organizations over the last decade.”

Hassabis has experience with navigating AI gold rushes that roil tech giants—although last time around he himself sparked the frenzy.

In 2014, DeepMind was acquired by Google after demonstrating striking results from software that used reinforcement learning to master simple video games. Over the next several years, DeepMind showed how the technique does things that once seemed uniquely human—often with superhuman skill. When AlphaGo beat Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, many AI experts were stunned, because they had believed it would be decades before machines would become proficient at a game of such complexity. [read more]

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