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by xtreak295 hours ago |
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upvoteby jcfrei4 hours ago|
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I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to much more data: Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments - and so on. And they need the data in much higher fidelity than you can currently access. If we just feed AI with all the knowledge we've acquired it's much harder for it to become smarter than us - it basically needs it's own eyes, ears, nose and so on.
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upvoteby tomnicholas12 hours ago|
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> Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments

There are PetaBytes of important scientific data locked in archival file formats. The first step is to make this efficiently readable.

https://www.earthmover.io/blog/virtual-zarr

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659254

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upvoteby Oras3 hours ago|
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> Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available

I’ve been reading this sentiment on HN since GPT4o, yet models got better and better

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upvoteby yumraj2 hours ago|
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There’s a difference between things getting incrementally better and a step function.

LLMs will obviously keep getting incrementally better, but in order to get the kind on jump that LLMs themselves were, the sentiment is that we need something more.

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upvoteby solenoid09372 hours ago|
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Fable is a clear step function for me
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upvoteby willy_k3 hours ago|
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That’s because a significant portion of the work and spending going on at frontier labs is generating new, more curated data, in select domains like software engineering and now biology[1].

[1] https://www.synbiobeta.com/read/anthropic-is-hiring-biologis...

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upvoteby bkaae3 hours ago|
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I think that was his argument as well. It looks like there is no more data to find, but then it becomes important to find more data - lo and behold we can make more.

Sounds like the oil scare from 90' - we thought we were gonna run out of oil. But as oil gets more expensive it pays to dig further down to find the stuff that didn't make sense to dig up before.

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upvoteby xnx2 hours ago|
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Yes. The web is enormous, but just think of home much information within a company doesn't even make it into the internal knowledgebase, let alone anywhere public.
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upvoteby manvel_hn4 hours ago|
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It's quite interesting that those events are happening at the same moment. I wonder whether they are related
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upvoteby aix14 hours ago|
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I think there are multiple separate events here, timed to coincide in order to minimise disruption. It's hard to be sure whether they share overlapping causes, but I'd guess that there's at least an element of that.
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upvoteby xnx2 hours ago|
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Yes. In public relations you never want to trickle out bad/concerning the news, you want to "rip off the band-aid and preferably follow it up with some positive/distracting news like 3.5 Pro model release or price drops.
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upvoteby HarHarVeryFunny2 hours ago|
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Isn't it "just" a matter of Jeff Dean (& co) leaving, Hassabis replacing Dean, and Kavukcuoglu replacing Hassabis ?

A massive shake up for sure, but why do you see it as separate events merely timed to coincide ?

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upvoteby lostdog4 hours ago|
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Some do-nothing EVP probably just got control over the Gemini org
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upvoteby HarHarVeryFunny1 hours ago|
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Gemini had come under Hassabis, being co-led by Shazeer and Vinyals, who are now both gone. Gemini will now come under Koray Kavukcuoglu, reporting direct to Pichai as SVP of DeepMind.

Big shake up for Gemini it seems.

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upvoteby jgilias4 hours ago|
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Is it _that_ Jeff Dean?

https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts

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upvoteby AceJohnny21 hours ago|
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Fun fact: the Jeff Dean Facts was started by Kenton Varda (kentonv around here [1]), as a joke inside Google. He has expressed regret that it eclipsed Sanjay Ghemawat, with whom Jeff Dean basically did pair-programming with.

[1] also known for open-sourcing ProtoBufs v2, creating CapnProto and Sandstorm, and commenting on the recent Cloudflare OS post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49182996

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upvoteby judah3 hours ago|
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> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE)

Uh oh...

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upvoteby dekhn3 hours ago|
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Basically, he had a server that did code indexing running on his workstation. If he didn't login and run a command to refresh his prod credentials every day, the server would lose its ability to talk to prod (as it should) and fail. Much of the company depended on that service. Eventually it was moved to prod.
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upvoteby HarHarVeryFunny1 hours ago|
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That's a pretty poor reflection on him if true.

I've noticed that Gemini has been timing out yesterday & today !

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upvoteby pdpi4 hours ago|
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Yes, him.
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upvoteby 12345hn67894 hours ago|
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"Once, in early 2002, when the index servers went down, Jeff Dean answered user queries manually for two hours. Evals showed a quality improvement of 5 points."

ahahah golden.

Will be following their journey

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upvoteby mosura4 hours ago|
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Is the subtext that Demis was trying to block what Dean etc wanted to do and so they had to leave Google in order to do it?
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upvoteby 5 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby throwaw124 hours ago|
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Is Jeff also leaving Google?

I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team

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upvoteby compiler-guy4 hours ago|
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They are leaving Google, but Google is an investor in the new company. So a split, but not exactly a divorce. Or something.
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upvoteby asdfman1234 hours ago|
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A "Maria's not an asset to the abbey" situation for you Sound of Music enjoyers.
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upvoteby leoc1 hours ago|
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It seems reminiscent of the Green Project/FirstPerson episode that led to Java https://landley.net/history/mirror/java/javaorigin.html , and I'm sure many another attempt to keep some unhappy star players in a company's orbit using a spinoff.
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upvoteby compiler-guy3 hours ago|
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Except no one was singing "How do you solve a problem like Jeff and Sanjay?" prior to this.
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upvoteby asdfman1233 hours ago|
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You don't know that for sure.
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upvoteby defen33 minutes ago|
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Ewing Theory, but for trillion dollar corporations.
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upvoteby colesantiago4 hours ago|
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> I am sure VCs are fighting to invest and they will get 4B investment immediately with this team

This is probably the only time some prominent VCs would be active during August, only for Jeff Dean & Co's company.

I can see them now frantically negotiating, responding and firing off emails right now during their holidays to get an allocation in Jeff's new company.

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upvoteby tcp_handshaker4 hours ago|
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Would love to hear the pitch: We never had the lead in AI and now definitely lost it, despite the gazillions dollars and engineering resources of Google, but now will be different?
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upvoteby harshreality4 hours ago|
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The "lead" in AI, even with google's TPU advantage, may not make economic sense for a company. Can you make back the training investment on a competitive frontier model, before everyone switches to a newer frontier model within a year?
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upvoteby stefan_4 hours ago|
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Turns out you can't pay em as much as VC will, haha
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upvoteby dominotw4 hours ago|
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its a public benefit corp
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upvoteby bix64 hours ago|
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Don’t worry they will just limit them to a 10x return but then later on just convert to for profit and fahgetabout the cap!
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upvoteby solenoid09372 hours ago|
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I don't think Anthropic (the only major PBC in this space) ever did this.

OpenAI did but they had a totally different structure and were never a PBC.

If these guys adopt a similar LTBT+PBC structure to Anthropic it should be more resilient.

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upvoteby cherryteastain4 hours ago|
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So is Anthropic...
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upvoteby solenoid09371 hours ago|
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Anthropic has stuck pretty closely to their stated intent even if HN does not agree with that intent
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upvoteby stefan_3 hours ago|
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Funny how that works, so are Anthropic and OpenAI apparently. Maybe there is something we are missing here!
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