Humanity is standing “on the foothills of the singularity,” Demis Hassabis said at I/O on Tuesday. The DeepMind CEO's remark stunned the audience. Hassabis shared on Wednesday why he felt that way. Building video games late at night with AI convinced Hassabis that humanity is entering a new era.
This past summer, Google DeepMind debuted Genie 3. It's what's known as a world world, an AI system capable of generating images and reacting as the user moves through the environment the software is simulating. At the time, DeepMind positioned Genie 3 as a tool for training AI agents. Now, it's making the model available to people outside of Google to try with Project Genie.
In early June, shortly after the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season, Google unveiled a new model designed specifically to forecast the tracks and intensity of tropical cyclones. Part of the Google DeepMind suite of AI-based weather research models, the "Weather Lab" model for cyclones was a bit of an unknown for meteorologists at its launch. In a blog post at the time, Google said its new model, trained on a vast dataset that reconstructed past weather and a specialized database containing key information about hurricanes tracks, intensity, and size, had performed well during pre-launch testing.
