Nolan > Recent Status Updates

It’s sad to see that early 2000s Burma and today’s Burma were not really different in terms of the political landscape. It’s hard to categorize this book in one sense. It’s part biography of George Orwell, part social history of Burma, and part travelogue of Emma’s experience. She started her journey from Mandalay and Maymyo, to the Delta, where Orwell spent his time, and told her experience along the way.

- Demis underestimated language models
- AlphaFold story
- AI race on LLM models
- Google Brain and Deepmind merged
- Google models are always behind
- Deepmind’s been really big at RL and still got beaten by GPT o1 model
- Google’s CoT paper and other attempts
- Demis won a Nobel prize in chemistry

Now Hassabis stepped down to be the president of Deepmind and Silver founded Ineffable Intelligence.

- AlphaGo’s win over Lee Sel Dol
- AlphaGo Zero focusing on RL
- Elon’s fear against Sergey and Google’s control of AI
- Founded OpenAI with Sam and Sutskever
- Focused on RNN and Seq2Seq but not good
- Google released a transformer and “Attention is all you need” without RNN
- GPT came out

- childhood competing in chess tournaments
- teenage years working at a gaming company, Bullfrog productions, inventing a theme park game with agents
- undergrad life at Cambridge
- his first gaming company, Elixir Studios, and a co-founder breakup
- postgrad life at UCL in Neuroscience
- founded Deepmind and funded by Founders Fund
- got acquired by Google
- built AlphaGo