Demis Hassabis on Intelligence Squared
Demis Hassabis and Sebastian Mallaby on The Quest for Artificial General Intelligence (Part One)
A notably candid piece of institutional history: Hassabis says withholding Google’s early LaMDA product was, in retrospect, probably the wrong decision and explains the reliability concerns behind it. This stands apart from his more familiar AGI forecasts and Google-competitiveness material.
Well, look, actually the story is pretty complicated in the sense that the leading labs at the time, us included, and actually both DeepMind and the Google Lab, Google Brain, had large language models. In fact, the Google Brain side of it had a product, a very early one, it was called Lambda in those days. And there'd been a conscious decision not to release that. And it was obviously, in retrospect, probably the wrong decision, but you can sort of see. And I wasn't involved in that because we were at the time just supposed to be working on research.
Demis Hassabis discusses why Google was cautious about releasing early language models, given their tendency to produce incorrect information. He says ChatGPT’s rapid adoption revealed broad, creative uses for imperfect systems and showed that the technology was ready to reach the public.