Google DeepMind launches institute to widen the AGI debate - TechCrunch

The DeepMind Institute launched on Wednesday to 'widen the AGI debate,' and the widening extends to three directors: DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, Google executive James Manyika and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis. Three people, three Google nameplates, one press release — a genuinely broad church, provided your church is in Mountain View. The debate has been widened to include everyone who already had a seat at the table. This is what institutional humility looks like when it has a communications department.

The actual substance is Hassabis's inaugural essay, in which he proposes a U.S.-led frontier AI standards body to evaluate the most advanced AI models. Read that again: not a regulator proposing to evaluate the frontier, but a frontier lab proposing the body that does the evaluating, led, he suggests, by the United States. We have been down this corridor before, when Anthropic's Dario Amodei proposed voluntary industry standards and the FTC's Andrew Ferguson said the suggestion set all his alarm bells off. The sequel has arrived with better branding and a university-launch tone.

What the institute does not appear to include is a single director whose job is to tell Google no, which is the one appointment that would have made the widening mean anything. 'U.S.-led' is carrying a great deal of freight: a national standards body for a technology deployed everywhere, drafted by a company headquartered in the nation in question, and announced in the same fortnight that Senator Mark Warner told Reuters Congress should pass AI safety legislation by the end of the year. So the labs draft the blueprint, Washington supplies the adjective, and the AGI conversation is widened to everyone who was already in the room. Presumably the follow-up essay will explain who gets to grade the grader.