Google Wins AI, According to Google AI
April 29, 2025
No AI. This old dinobaby just plods along, delighted he is old and this craziness will soon be left behind. What about you?
Wow, not even insecure pop stars explain how wonderful they are at every opportunity. But Google is not going to stop explaining that it is number one in smart software. Never mind the lawsuits. Never mind the Deepseek thing. Never mind Sam AI-Man. Never mind angry Googlers who think the company will destroy the world.
Just get the message, “We have won.”
I know this because I read the weird PR interview called “Demis Hassabis Is Preparing for AI’s Endgame,” which is part of the “news” about the Time 100 most wonderful and intelligence and influential and talented and prescient people in the Time world.
Let’s take a quick look at a few of the statements in the marketing story. Because I am a dinobaby, I will wrap up with a few observations designed to make clear the difference between old geezers like me and the youthful new breed of Time leaders.
Here’s the first passage I noted:
He believes AGI [Googler Hassabis] would be a technology that could not only solve existing problems, but also come up with entirely new explanations for the universe. A test for its existence might be whether a system could come up with general relativity with only the information Einstein had access to; or if it could not only solve a longstanding hypothesis in mathematics, but theorize an entirely new one. “I identify myself as a scientist first and foremost,” Hassabis says. “The whole reason I’m doing everything I’ve done in my life is in the pursuit of knowledge and trying to understand the world around us.”
First comment. Yep, I noticed the reference to Einstein. That’s reasonable intellectual territory for a Googler. I want to point out that the Google is in a bit of legal trouble because it did not play fair. But neither did Einstein. Instead of fighting evil in Europe, he lit out for the US of A. I mean a genius of the Einstein ilk is not going to risk one’s life. Just think. Google is a thinking outfit, but I would suggest that its brush with authorities is different from Einstein’s. But a scientist working at an outfit in trouble with authorities, no big deal, right? AI is a way to understand the world around us. Breaking the law? What?
The second snippet is this one:
When DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014, Hassabis insisted on a contractual firewall: a clause explicitly prohibiting his technology from being used for military applications. It was a red line that reflected his vision of AI as humanity’s scientific savior, not a weapon of war.
Well, that red line was made of erasable market red. It has disappeared. And where is the Nobel prize winner? Still at the Google, that’s the outfit that is in trouble with the law and reasonably good at discarding notions that don’t fit with its goal of generating big revenue from ads and assorted other ventures like self driving taxi cabs. Noble indeed.
Okay, here’s the third comment:
That work [dumping humans for smart software], he says, is not intended to hasten labor disruptions, but instead is about building the necessary scaffolding for the type of AI that he hopes will one day make its own scientific discoveries. Still, as research into these AI “agents” progresses, Hassabis says, expect them to be able to carry out increasingly more complex tasks independently. (An AI agent that can meaningfully automate the job of further AI research, he predicts, is “a few years away.”)
I think that Google will just say, “Yo, dudes, smart software is efficient. Those who lose their jobs can re-skill like the humanoids we are allowing to find their future elsewhere.
Several observations:
- I think that the Time people are trying to balance their fear of smart software replacing outfits like Time with the excitement of watching smart software create a new way experiencing making a life. I don’t think the Timers achieved their goal.
- The message that Google thinks, cares, and has lofty goals just doesn’t ring true. Google is in trouble with the law for a reason. It was smart enough to make money, but it was not smart enough to avoid honking off regulators in some jurisdictions. I can’t reconcile illegal behavior with baloney about the good of mankind.
- Google wants to be seen as the big dog of AI. The problem is that saying something is different from the reality of trials, loss of trust among some customer sectors, floundering for a coherent message about smart software, and the baloney that the quantumly supreme Google convinces people to propagate.
Okay, you may love the Time write up. I am amused, and I think some of the lingo will find its way into the Sundar & Prabhakar Comedy Show. Did you hear the one about Google’s AI not being used for weapons?
Stephen E Arnold, April 29, 2025
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
