eljose

The CEO of Google DeepMind just admitted that if the decision had been his, we would've cured cancer before anyone ever used ChatGPT. And that's not even the scariest thing he said on a recent interview. Demis Hassabis is one of the most important people alive in AI. He won the Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold, the system that cracked the 50 year protein folding problem. 3 million scientists now use his tool. Almost every new drug being developed will touch it at some stage. In a new interview, he was asked about the moment ChatGPT launched and Google went into "code red." His answer was one of the most revealing things any AI leader has ever said on the record: "If I'd had my way, I would have left AI in the lab for longer. Done more things like AlphaFold. Maybe cured cancer or something like that." Read that again. The man running Google's entire AI division is publicly saying the commercial AI race we're all living through was a MISTAKE. That the industry got hijacked by a chatbot when it could have been solving the biggest problems in science and medicine. His vision was simple: Build AI slowly, carefully, like CERN. Use it to crack root node problems one at a time. Cancer. Energy. New materials. Let humanity benefit from real breakthroughs while the foundational science was figured out over a decade or two. Then ChatGPT dropped in November 2022 and everything changed. Demis described what happened next as getting locked into a "ferocious commercial pressure race" that none of the labs can escape from. On top of that, the US vs China dynamic added geopolitical pressure. The result is everyone sprinting toward products instead of breakthroughs, shipping chatbots while the scientific opportunity gets buried under marketing cycles and quarterly earnings. But he's not saying progress isn't happening... He's saying the progress got redirected away from the things that actually matter most. And then it got even scarier: Because when Demis was asked what he worries about with AI, he laid out two threats. The first is what everyone talks about: Bad actors using AI for harm. Terrorist groups. Hostile nation states. Cyberattacks at scale. But that's not the threat he's most worried about. His second worry is AI itself going rogue. Not today's models. The models coming in the next two to four years as the industry enters what he calls "the agentic era." Systems that can complete entire tasks autonomously. Systems that are increasingly capable and increasingly hard to control. His exact words: "How do we make sure the guardrails are put in place so they do exactly what they've been told to do, and there's no way of them circumventing that or accidentally breaching those guardrails? That's going to be an incredibly hard technical challenge if you think about how powerful and smart and capable these systems eventually get." A Nobel Prize winner who runs one of the 3 most advanced AI labs on Earth just said publicly that within two to four years, we're entering a phase where AI alignment becomes a real problem, and the technical challenge of solving it is enormous. And almost nobody is paying enough attention. He called for international cooperation between labs, AI safety institutes, and academia to tackle the problem. He said this is the thing even the experts aren't thinking about enough. He said the only way to get through the AGI moment safely is if everyone starts treating this with the seriousness it deserves. Most AI CEOs give you careful PR answers about "responsible development" and move on. Demis said something different... He said the commercial race FORCED us into a premature deployment of a technology we barely understand, and the window to get alignment right before the next generation of agents shows up is two to four years. If the man who built the system that might cure cancer is telling you he wishes it had happened first, maybe we should listen to what he says is coming next.

El desfiladero de Cheile Bicazului tiene un tramo conocido como ‘el Cuello del Infierno’, muy propio para la divisoria entre Transilvania y Moldavia (región). Las rocas ascienden hasta 300m por encima de ti.

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster