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Google has close to the best internal tooling in the industry for a decade or so.

Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.

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Replacement for what? Google has some good internal tools, mostly the older ones. They're lucky to be using React instead of Angular at Facebook though.
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I have a friend at Google DeepMind who tells me that Google believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does, which is probably why no one with conviction wants to work there.
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A few months ago I heard Demis Hassabis say something, albeit vague, I doubt he truly believed regarding AGI. That AGI is relatively near is the party line everywhere. That may contribute to creating toxic environments and lousy investment decisions. So here we go with the FOMO.
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How much belief is that? I tend to skip the HN posts that are about AI.
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Most of HN does not take the idea of superintelligence seriously, and until this year did not take the idea of AGI seriously.

I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework

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I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously, but think all the major labs and most of the academic research is not helping achieve it any serious way. The field is seriously delusional (and has been ever since GPT 3 was released).

Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

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Genuine question: can I ask why?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :)

I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.

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> I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously

> I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

I have no background in CS, so apologies if this is a naive question, but what makes you take AGI seriously, but also say that LLMs are a dead end?

i.e., is there something else that you think is not a dead end?

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Looked up LessWrong. Eh, philosophy people, also known for that "Roko's basilisk" meme. I'm gonna pass.
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I think HN believes in AGI. HN probably doesn't believe LLMs will lead to AGI.

Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).

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Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.
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If the tools are all in the same monorepo idk if that's actually true
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What do you mean about them being in the monorepo?
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The tooling is not the problem. If shit takes forever to launch, it's because there are many stakeholders that need to be satisfied (some for security, some for regulatory, some for the kinds of politics you get in a company that employs almost half a million people.)
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But GDM isn't gated on launches. They were freely releasing things internally for dogfood. Problem is that stuff was just not as good as the competition.
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A particular Google product being shit is a data point, but is orthogonal to my opinion about why it is slow to launch products/features.
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> because even Gemini doesn't understand Google-internal tooling.

this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.

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Only the GFG models know anything internal. Regular Gemini isn't trained on any of that. And GFG is a much older base model, so people use the regular one. If the tools seem to handle google3 code ok, it's only because of skills and not the model itself, and then you run into issues with skill bloat. Sometimes the A/B test would give me the bad model of the day that'd try to grep all of piper.

Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.

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Your information is indeed out of date.
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No longer the case
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Maybe they are forced to use Google search.
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No, they have an actually good internal search. And there are some good things like stubby, but again pretty annoying that Gemini doesn't understand stubby.
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Uh isn’t google known to have the best tooling in the world
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They earned that reputation in like 2005. Some people have been there so long (without doing side projects) that they don't even know what non-Google tooling looks like in the past 2 decades.
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