From Jeff's twitter post:

> Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen <at>NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise in machine learning as well as large-scale systems.

See also: https://www.nae.edu/20782/grand-challenges-project

Those 14 are:

NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering

1. Make Solar Energy Economical

2. Provide Energy from Fusion

3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods

4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle

5. Provide Access to Clean Water

6. Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure

7. Advance Health Informatics

8. Engineer Better Medicines

9. Reverse Engineer the Brain

10. Prevent Nuclear Terror

11. Secure Cyberspace

12. Enhance Virtual Reality

13. Advance Personalized Learning

14. Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery

• beloch

  today at 8:02 PM

  They make many bold promises, but their core goal is neatly encapsulated on the website:

  "Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today."

  This is the same goal as every other AI company out there. Automate away the human employees and let a small number of "people" (note that they do not say scientists or engineers for this part) take the credit and financial rewards for every good thing this human-free system produces.

  • sejje

    today at 8:07 PM

    Why shouldn't they?

    Also, wouldn't anyone with half a brain use the human-free system to produce another human-free system that was no longer controlled by the "small number of 'people'"?

    • beloch

      today at 8:54 PM

      My main point is that people shouldn't just swallow the noble and lofty sounding PR. These guys are the same as everyone else in the sector. Don't ignore the harmful or scummy things they'll inevitably do. Hold them accountable. If they are as noble as they sound, they should agree with me.

    • a2ff6eeb0

      today at 8:30 PM

      Why do you think you'd be given access and permission to do this? If a company genuinely cracks this human free system problem, why would they open it up, instead of simply outcompeting everyone that doesn't have their product?

    • nwienert

      today at 8:20 PM

      Life's unfair, avoiding power concentration is a decent principle.

      If you grow up in the right place at the right time, how much should you be in control of everyone else's life?

• Sivart13

  today at 6:09 PM

  The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.

  Maybe if our biggest companies did something other than suck up to science denying wackos, some progress could be made in these areas.

  • Marha01

    today at 7:23 PM

    > The solution to most of these problems lies in policy, not in new tech advancements.

    That is not mutually exclusive. If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

    You can think of it like this: our "political technology" is not good enough to use solar energy at its current prices to replace fossil fuels as fast as we would like. Well, what about if we cut the price of solar by a factor of five? Perhaps it will be good enough then.

    • qwertygnu

      today at 7:49 PM

      That sounds like just playing further and further into the game of the corrupt leaders. Who do you think would profit off that 5x margin? Would that margin come more likely from a scientific breakthrough of via some new exploitation of natural resources or human labor?

      It's yearsss past time that our leaders should have changed policy.

    • bossyTeacher

      today at 8:34 PM

      > If technological advances result in a given technology becoming cheaper, more scalable, and easier to deploy, they also make it easier to advocate for and implement the relevant policies.

      Your thinking reminds me of this https://xkcd.com/538/

  • zahlman

    today at 8:40 PM

    Making progress requires first not dismissing your ideological outgroup along such lines, and instead trying to understand what actually motivates them.

  • podgietaru

    today at 6:14 PM

    Policy and funding. One of which will be sucked up by this venture.

  • floatrock

    today at 7:52 PM

    Hey now, our biggest companies do more than suck up to science denying wackos, don't be so unfair... sometimes our biggest companies fund their wacko superpacs!

  • tbrownaw

    today at 6:26 PM

    I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.

    I would think the claim in the second sentence would only be relevant in case of the inverse of the claim in the first sentence.

    • DaiPlusPlus

      today at 6:36 PM

      > I do not see how the second sentence follows from the first.

      Point 1 on the list is "Make Solar Energy Economical".

      Solar is economical today - mostly due to China investing (and heavily subsidising) in solar for the past couple of decades; but compare to the US where certain particular big-businesses (oil companies, mostly) were instead cynically funding disinformation efforts and getting into bed with the Republican party (which dovetailed with the GOP's allying with other science-denying movements of the Bush Jr era like creationism and public-health matters with abstinence-only sex-ed and defunding gun safety research efforts) - means we're decades behind where we could have been...

      Consider an alternative past, where the GOP had the backbone to resist the oil industry's corruptive influence and instead made a big bet on American Solar; it's entirely possible that instead of MAGA today we'd instead have a right-wing coalition strongly supporting solar and wind energy because they align nicely with American rugged individualism - whereas the current situation on the right is an unprincipled farce with inconsistencies in policy positions at every turn.

      • slongfield

        today at 6:43 PM

        This is not a particularly new struggle: Jimmy Carter installed American-made solar water panels on the White House in 1979, then Reagan tore them out.

      • xnx

        today at 8:23 PM

        Improving panels or batteries (e.g. through automated material discovery) would make solar energy economical in a lot more regions.

      • holmesworcester

        today at 6:49 PM

        Solar is not (yet) economical for reliable, year-round electricity because of storage costs. China coal use is growing again this year.

        • Arainach

          today at 6:59 PM

          Solar is profitable to install at both industrial and home scale in most areas. You're moving the goalposts.

          • xnx

            today at 8:24 PM

            It would be even better if it had ROI in 2 years instead of 10 for northern installs.

        • marcosdumay

          today at 7:48 PM

          Where do you find the information for 2026?

  • today at 7:03 PM

  • ivanovm

    today at 7:50 PM

    It's a total delusion to think that the key to reverse-engineering the brain or producing energy from fusion is policy.

    It also happens to be the favorite pretext for people to seize more political power and launder more money through nonprofits though.

  • RajuChacha108

    today at 6:26 PM

    [flagged]

• delta_p_delta_x

  today at 8:43 PM

  > Provide Access to Clean Water

  ??? We don't need any AI for this.

  Start with separated sewage/wastewater and stormwater drains. Then accredited and highly scrutinised wastewater treatment and discharge into water bodies (or see below for a high-tech solution). As for clean water to the home, direct those stormwater drains to new reservoirs which sustain freshwater aquatic life. Protect aquifers from over-drainage, and build pipelines from water-abundant regions to water-scarce regions.

  To reclaim waste water or treat unknown water sources back to potable/semiconductor standards we have ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, UV treatment, pH adjustment, fluoridation, desalination, softening (which is generally obviated by RO...). This is basically Singapore's NEWater.

  Good sanitation is a financial and political problem. The engineering has been solved for decades now.

  • michaelbarton

    today at 8:52 PM

    Agree. Same for better medicines. We could get pretty far just by getting existing medicines that work to people who need them.

• darth_avocado

  today at 6:30 PM

  > Make Solar Energy Economical

  Isn’t it already?

  • glenstein

    today at 7:31 PM

    Definitely pretty far along imo. But maybe they consider the progress bar to be at 75% or 80% rather than 100%.

  • Marha01

    today at 7:24 PM

    Not enough. The more economical it is, the better.

  • frollogaston

    today at 7:33 PM

    People on HN keep saying it is, but I'm still not seeing it. Companies are building datacenters in vast, sun-blasted deserts and still choosing to power those with natural gas. This in turn makes people complain about emissions pledges being reversed, but if it were economical, no pledge would be needed.

    Of course, USA has cheaper oil/gas than other countries. But if you look elsewhere, rich countries are subsidizing solar, poor ones are basically not using it.

    • jarpschope

      today at 7:55 PM

      I don't think you have an updated view of energy production.

      https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/20/how-globa...

      In the chart for section 3, how many countries have seen their share of electricity being generated by fossil fuels increase in the last 5 years? Only Canada.

      Take a look at the charts for Pakistan, Australia, Nigeria, and China for the last few years. Pretty dramatic drops for fossil fuels generation.

      • zahlman

        today at 8:47 PM

        Oof. What's going on here in Canada with that recent uptick? Last I checked it seemed like all the trends were good.

      • frollogaston

        today at 8:01 PM

        They cherrypicked 15 countries. And still, some of those still had renewables decrease since 2000 like Nigeria, others saw an increase but it's still way less than fossil, and others like China are heavily subsidizing solar. I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.

        • blahblaher

          today at 8:24 PM

          Look at Australia then. Millions of homes already using solar yo basically power their homes for free most of the time. Yes it was subsidized, like oil was and still is. Solar without subsidies is already miles better than oil and gas.

          • frollogaston

            today at 8:31 PM

            Australia is a rich country that subsidizes solar

    • ravst3s

      today at 8:03 PM

      Solar is dirt cheap in China, where 85% of panels are produced. The problem is they're made in China and face tariffs/import bans in the US/Europe.

      Nat gas is preferred for AI DCs because it has faster time-to-market, doesn't have the intermittency issues. Training on solar + storage is an issue because of network synchronization.

      • frollogaston

        today at 8:17 PM

        I get the gas turbine for semi-temp power when there's not enough grid support, but they're talking about doing this long-term: https://www.gstatic.com/marketing-cms/79/80/fb229abf40efa81e... . Not a single mention of "solar" or "renewable" in there. Are they just trying to appease Trump administration?

    • UncleOxidant

      today at 7:57 PM

      > poor ones are basically not using it.

      I don't think that's true: https://rmi.org/resources/the-global-souths-cleantech-revolu...

      • frollogaston

        today at 8:07 PM

        "RMI drives investment to scale clean energy solutions"

    • jay_kyburz

      today at 8:30 PM

      Data centers need lots of power 24/7 and regardless of cloud cover. Solar is great to reduce your daytime bills but you still need other methods to cover the downtime.

      I would be surprised if data centers didn't put in gas _and_ solar.

• LogicFailsMe

  today at 5:39 PM

  Sandbox 2.0

  But also, solar power is already economical.

  • podgietaru

    today at 6:10 PM

    Many of these problems don't seem scientific at all, but rather a problem of political will.

    As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical. There are plenty of ideas around putting them over farms, or parking lots en-masse to provide cleaner energy.

    Access to clean drinking water, while certainly scientific in some situations, is also a problem of political will and money.

    Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure - It's infrastructure week!

    • Marha01

      today at 7:25 PM

      > As you said, Solar power is incredibly economical.

      Not if you include the cost of needed storage.

      • gfarah

        today at 7:53 PM

        Yes It is. Even including batteries:

        https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lcoe-and-valu...

      • UncleOxidant

        today at 7:59 PM

        That's going to drop a lot as sodium-ion batteries go into large-scale production.

    • RajuChacha108

      today at 6:28 PM

      It is not economical compared to alternatives that is why you have to have government to force people to do things. In many places such as Pakistan where solar power is not economical on paper is actually very successful in practice because it is actually profitable.

      To make solar power practical and economical you need may a square foot of solar panel being able to get enough energy to power and entire home for a week

      • snaking0776

        today at 7:24 PM

        https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...

        Not sure what you’re talking about here. We can’t replace all energy needs with solar but it’s clearly one of the cheapest energy sources and with the added benefit of low capital expense to get started so you can set it up in distributed grids without the massive expenditure to support nuclear installations.

  • elicash

    today at 5:50 PM

    Seems to have been developed in 2008 (continuing through 2017), which explains the "economical" framing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Engineerin...

  • xnx

    today at 8:26 PM

    In some regions, but it would be great if it was economical in cloudy Seattle and not just the sunbelt

  • glaslong

    today at 5:51 PM

    At this point the Hard Problem is policy to get out of solar's way.

  • staplers

    today at 5:50 PM

      3. Develop Carbon Sequestration Methods
    

    If only we could invent a solar-powered, self-replicating, carbon-stacking, habitat-building machine..

    • marcosdumay

      today at 7:52 PM

      Not to say we shouldn't grow plants... But we can do it 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more efficiently with machines.

    • twothreeone

      today at 5:59 PM

      Yes, plant more trees!

      • rush86999

        today at 6:02 PM

        That's what he was trying to imply

• zahlman

  today at 8:39 PM

  In what sense is solar energy not already economical?

• vovavili

  today at 7:02 PM

  Very honorable effort, but a lot of these seem to touch heavily regulated industries impeded by unwise or outdated policy no less than by the lack of clever engineering - medicine, education, urbanism, energy. I wonder if they've given some thought to the key blocking factor as well.

• koolala

  today at 6:04 PM

  Room Temperature Ambient Pressure Super Conductors

• epicureanideal

  today at 6:05 PM

  Would be great if they'd add:

  Reverse human aging.

  (Maybe a sub-topic under "Engineer Better Medicines".)

  • dag100

    today at 7:07 PM

    Why not just add 'mind control' while you're at it.

    Only death stops stagnation in the end. Without death, especially if death can be avoided by the rich and powerful but not the poor, life will get much, much worse for the average person (until only the rich and their automated capital remain I suppose, in which scenario they will simply turn on each other).

• dbgrman

  today at 6:08 PM

  Why is "12. Enhance Virtual Reality" in there? T_T

  • cheschire

    today at 7:37 PM

    When one of them dies, they want to leave behind a puzzle so complex that entire groups of the population dedicate their lives to solving it within the virtual world. They look old enough to have a lot of favorite 1980’s and 90’s pop culture references, so those will probably be the clues.

  • cm2012

    today at 8:43 PM

    You dont see making heaven on earth worth doing?

  • Sivart13

    today at 6:10 PM

    I guess if we failed to Prevent Nuclear Terror the bunker denizens of the future are gonna need somewhere to hang out.

  • xnx

    today at 8:28 PM

    Higher-fidelity telepresence could be as significant as the recent COVID work-from-home wave.

  • embedding-shape

    today at 7:39 PM

    I'm guessing this might be about "teleoperation" (like remote surgery via robots + VR) and being able to remote training as well. The binocular vision VR gives you compared to flat screens help a lot with depth perception for precision of incisions for example.

• dgellow

  today at 7:06 PM

  Such a weird list. How is preventing nuclear terror an engineering problem?

  • vanviegen

    today at 8:06 PM

    Satellite/drone detection of nuclear material? Shooting missiles out of the sky?

    • jay_kyburz

      today at 8:33 PM

      We know where all the bombs are. They are connected to a button on Trumps desk.

• lovlar

  today at 6:23 PM

  > 9. Reverse Engineer the Brain

  For what purpose? To replace humans? To make social media more addictive? To master brain manipulation?

  • embedding-shape

    today at 7:40 PM

    > For what purpose?

    To understand, same reason you reverse engineer anything. Doesn't have to have a further goal than that, understanding the brain better helps in so many ways. But like most technology, obviously can be used for bad too. Should we just skip researching some topics then?

    • lovlar

      today at 8:21 PM

      I'm all for alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders, but yes, some topics are worth skipping research on. For example chemical/biological/nuclear weapons, human cloning, and unethical gene modification.

      I just like to challenge myself, as an engineer, with the idea that not everything has to be engineered and optimized. What if we simply left some things unexplored and mysterious, and trusted nature and our own human capabilities?

      A better way of alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders might just be to focus on societal factors.

  • tantalor

    today at 6:31 PM

    We have a good understanding of the function (and more importantly dysfunction of) kidneys, lungs, heart, etc. from high level to cellular level.

    For brain, our understanding is fuzzy, more like "this part is important for that behavior" or "here is how neuron works" but we don't have a holistic understanding.

    If we had that, we could more easily diagnose and treat neurological disorder.

  • captainclam

    today at 7:12 PM

    I imagine a good model of the brain would contribute enormously to alleviating psychiatric/mental health disorders.

  • RajuChacha108

    today at 6:26 PM

    To do human brain activities at scale.

    • willy_k

      today at 6:32 PM

      So the second option then.

    • fcarraldo

      today at 6:30 PM

      This is called a “corporation”

• sajithdilshan

  today at 6:12 PM

  I would say 5, 6, 10 can be even done today if we had right politicians that can make policies for the people

  • merona_io

    today at 7:07 PM

    agreed

• mrdependable

  today at 6:06 PM

  Which engineering discipline touches most of these?

• la64710

  today at 5:53 PM

  Please add fixing neuro issues like autism add etc on the list. It creates a huge burden on families.

  • hiddencost

    today at 7:09 PM

    Idk, they never struck me as being into eugenics.

    What the fuck man? I really don't want some tech startup trying to "fix" my neurodivergence.

• tcp_handshaker

  today at 5:16 PM

  Acquisition back by Google in 3 years, with nothing to show for it. VCs will make a ton.

  • returnInfinity

    today at 5:53 PM

    Google stock would drop big if this new company was being funded by competitors

  • tgma

    today at 5:19 PM

    and... the VC is Google.

    Gotta compensate them somehow.

  • ex1fm3ta

    today at 5:47 PM

    Sometimes you got to find a way to buy the silence of your top employee, to prevent them from going to the competition. This "start-up" is shallow as hell

  • hiddencost

    today at 7:10 PM

    These people are all already making 9 figure compensation packages, I think if they thought they could do the work they wanted at Google, they would.

    • tgma

      today at 8:29 PM

      9 figure is hardly enough when some kid sells their vscode fork to them for more, is it? Why not just boomerang and get $$$.

    • xnx

      today at 8:36 PM

      Given the resources that would be available to them at Google: compute resources, data, etc. It's clear they want absolute freedom. Good for them. At this revolutionary turning point in history, I want the smartest people working in whatever area they want.

  • DataDaoDe

    today at 5:20 PM

    My thoughts exactly

  • dude250711

    today at 5:26 PM

    For all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.

This seems to be an institutional, massively scaled version of https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch.

In March Karpathy described this direction:

   The next step for autoresearch is that it has to be asynchronously massively collaborative for agents (think: SETI@home style).

Seems like Karpathy was largely focused on ML / SWE research rather than the other domains this group is after. Still, hard to imagine they were not influenced by autoresearch.

Andrej, if you're around, please share your thoughts on Discovery Loop.

• eamag

  today at 8:49 PM

  That's a very silly comparison, there are many startups working on RSI, karpathy is just a basic version to try the concept (similar to his gpt work)

• ozgung

  today at 7:01 PM

  That is also what I understand from that page. Autoresearch is the closest thing we (mainstream audience) know of but I am sure there is already an active research literature around it.

How do you automate experimentation?

Doubtlessly, AI can iterate at superhuman speeds in the domains of thought and design: Software, mathematical proofs, literature search.

But in the realm of experiment? Alas it is the lack of a body that constrains it.

Rather than transcendence what AI requires is immanence. In the human flesh may we find the godhead living among men. Let the laboratories, warehouses, and factories fill with the sound of its labor, as it builds a wall with a million hands that are not its own.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

• flatline

  today at 6:14 PM

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments

• nonameiguess

  today at 6:18 PM

  You're halfway there, but the only impediment isn't on the side of the researchers. Many of these topics they're trying to solve involve human subject research. Even with tireless embodied researchers who work around the clock and don't require breaks, you can't make the thing you're studying happen faster. The biggest reason we use poor proxy measures for things like longevity and mortality research is the simple impracticality of finding two groups of randomly selected people, ensuring you can control their entire lives for 60 years, the only difference between them is one variable, and see who lives longer. Putting aside the ethics, even if you could find willing subjects and actually control their entire lives to that extent, it would still take 60 years to gather the data you need. It doesn't make any difference whether robots or humans are running the program.

  One of my favorite books from the past few decades is The Extravagant Universe, written by one of the astronomers who helped discover dark energy and develop the current most-accepted model of cosmology. I love this book because of the emphasis on physical process in astronomy. Part of the reason it took decades to study this problem is they need to collect data from supernovae. Those only happen so often in places we're looking. You can't automate alignment of the heavens. It happens when it happens.

• moelf

  today at 5:43 PM

  would love to see how AI can automate the construction of the next high energy particle collider

  • scrlk

    today at 5:52 PM

    "You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have pushed the anti-mass spectrometer to 105% power, causing a resonance cascade. This was a major oversight on my part."

    • EstanislaoStan

      today at 6:44 PM

      But I always wanted to try headcrab souffle.

• mbonnet

  today at 5:52 PM

  > transcendence

  > immanence

  somebody has been studying Christian theology!

  • cute_boi

    today at 6:06 PM

    Beauty of human writing.

  • DaiPlusPlus

    today at 6:38 PM

    More like someone taking LessWrong postings too seriously.

  • nxnxj

    today at 6:06 PM

    [dead]

• numbers_guy

  today at 5:58 PM

  You can use simulators. However the problem is that if you're for example running material science experiments, those simulations will consume a lot of compute and take weeks, so spamming different approaches in the way an agent tends to work might not work quite as well.

  • danielmarkbruce

    today at 5:59 PM

    Building "simulators" that use ML/AI instead of running the calculations every step is a thing.

"Our mission is straightforward" continued by the most complex sentence on that page. Wondering what the definition of straightforward is now

• pphysch

  today at 5:29 PM

  Right. What about the scientific hardware (instruments, sensors, robotics)? Partnerships with existing research institutions? Dealing with restricted data?

  Modernizing science is a lot more complicated than just optimizing the inner experimental loop, but their hiring page implies it's a pure ML lab focused mainly on model development.

  • snitty

    today at 6:11 PM

    Yeah. ML is all well and good, but how are they going to do the science their machines design? Atoms cost money.

Really seems to embrace the "Making the world a better place by <<extremely convoluted, highly technical, jargon loaded mission statement>>"

• pickleRick243

  today at 6:58 PM

  Which part of it is highly technical or jargon loaded?

  • Grosvenor

    today at 8:22 PM

    I think it was a Neal Stephenson quote from cryptobimicon.

    It certainly increases shareholder value.

That founding team is insane. Very excited to see what happens here. I really like that they do not mention AGI or anything like that. Their mission statement reads pretty pragmatic compared to other AI companies (the bar is very low…)

Note that Jeff and crew have cleverly structured their company to avoid problematic uses of AI (e.g., weapons or tracking humans). I suspect that many top researchers will want to work there for this reason, and to work with other top researchers who have a history of delivering results.

• 2001zhaozhao

  today at 6:31 PM

  > Note that Jeff and crew have cleverly structured their company to avoid problematic uses of AI

  Do you have more sources/info on this?

  • tmoertel

    today at 8:36 PM

    They do not call attention to this aspect of their new company, but it is implicit in their business model:

    https://xcancel.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724

    In short, they are in the business of using AI to automate the discovery of useful knowledge, not to sell general-purpose AI capabilities that could be directly used in troubling ways.

  • moralestapia

    today at 7:53 PM

    x2

    All the "bad guys" of today were the "good guys" at some point in time. You even cheered for them back then.

• wavemode

  today at 7:51 PM

  Like how OpenAI is (was?) structured as a nonprofit?

• paganel

  today at 6:09 PM

  There's this somewhere on that page:

  > securing cyberspace,

  which has clear military implications, at least in today's age.

  • jedberg

    today at 7:29 PM

    So does more efficient cooking methods, but that is not the primary focus.

    As opposed to say weapons systems or targeting systems, which are really only for military use.

    The military needs a lot of things that other people need, and some things that only the military needs. If you don't work on the things only the military needs, I think you're in the clear.

  • tmoertel

    today at 6:17 PM

    Do you believe that securing cyberspace is problematic solely because it has military implications? I mean, everything has military implications. That fact doesn't imply, however, that those things are bad for society.

    • paganel

      today at 8:23 PM

      > I mean, everything has military implications

      In essence I agree with that, it's just that cyber-security has particularly been the focus of recent military discourse.

      Just yesterday I was reading an article here in the Romanian mainstream media about how Constanta Port's (our biggest port at the Black Sea) IT infrastructure has been under constant cyber attacks (presumably by the Russians) so as to hinder the export of Ukrainian grains through it. And this is just one of the many such (relatively) recent examples.

  • bredren

    today at 6:23 PM

    Securing cyberspace matters to everyone. Defending critical infrastructure or design of tactical cyber-offense is reasonably in scope for military work.

    However, reducing (or rather limiting the increase of) PII leakage and impact of ransomware activities is much closer to day-to-day mainstreet of most people.

    Anyone committed to advancing science should care about this regardless of its potential contributions to defense.

To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup. They truly deserve it, but I don't expect a huge success as a business.

That said, I hope they write cool papers with various peers across the industry without worrying too much about the competing dynamics. That'd be a blessing for humanity, and good for their spirit.

• canes123456

  today at 5:10 PM

  A public benefit corp shouldn’t be a start up. The primary goal of a start up is to grow as quickly as possible which is rarely benefits the public.

  Very silly to call every non start up a lifestyle business. It’s just a business. Start up are the weird thing that almost always an obscene waste of time and money, but sometime creates google.

  • kube-system

    today at 6:19 PM

    A PBC is not a charity or a non-profit. PBCs are for-profit businesses with the goal of making money. In day-to-day business they're indistinguishable with other for-profit corporations, including fundraising and investment. The only real practical difference is that they give directors a little more leeway in their fiduciary duties to say "no" to doing evil things.

    The advantage to a PBC is protecting founders from a serious problem with standard corporations: you might bring on investors who could subsequently demand you pollute, exploit people, and/or do other immoral activities for profit. You don't have to do these things to grow a business quickly.

    • snowwrestler

      today at 8:02 PM

      > The only real practical difference is that they give directors a little more leeway in their fiduciary duties to say "no" to doing evil things.

      I’d like to provide maybe a clarification here that there is zero existing fiduciary duty in regular corporations to say yes to evil things, or even to turn a profit at all. A for-profit C corporation can legally sell stock, lose money every year, and go out of business, if the board of directors approves that strategy. Fiduciary duty exists primarily in areas of accurate communication and the avoidance of crime, fraud, etc.

      A B corp basically is a C corp, but one that has formally published that their strategy includes a commitment to some social benefit. But if a C corp wanted to publish the same message to shareholders it could, and shareholder recourse would basically be to either try to replace the board, or sell the stock.

  • mgfist

    today at 6:16 PM

    > The primary goal of a start up is to grow as quickly as possible which is rarely benefits the public.

    Why is that so? Fast growth, when achieved honestly, is a result of solving user pain that others haven't. Maybe you think so because users != the public, but I think in totality the public is a collection of users who all have needs they want met.

    • markstos

      today at 6:23 PM

      For certain amount of fast growth: yes. Then there's continued "growth-hacking" and enshittification to keep fast revenue growing after the pain point has been solved with dark patterns and questionable tactics.

      Why? Because investors poured a bunch of money in to support fast growth and now they want their money back. And incremental growth won't do. Since 9 out of 10 of the investments fail, the surviving one has to continue to growth-hacking revenues.

  • flakiness

    today at 5:22 PM

    Fair point. Their page doesn't list any investors.

    • valleyer

      today at 5:51 PM

      The Times article lists several.

  • today at 6:40 PM

• wavemode

  today at 7:58 PM

  It can be both. Bell Labs performed a lot of speculative research while still producing economically valuable technology.

• sarjann

  today at 6:18 PM

  I don't see how not? A theoretical physicist can do all the thinking they want but if they can't test an idea against nature it's not super useful.

• tonfa

  today at 5:13 PM

  > To be honest, this feels more like a lifestyle business (aka hobby) than a startup

  They're also incredibly productive and can build/deliver really good stuff, so who knows :)

> Scientific discovery is bottlenecked.

Yah, by funding and how we award it, not by an imaginary lack of undergrad and grad students. Scientific funding requires a shotgun approach and many national science funds try to pick winners as opposed to funding broadly. When the folks who researched bacteria in volcanic vents or the molecular biology of the Gila monster they never could have imagined the industries and markets they'd create let alone the lives they'd impact (i.e., PCR and GLP-1 agonists). Lots of grants require you to explain how the work is "translational" or has some sort of economic application (even if not explicitly), but that'll just get us faster horses or whatever the Ford quote is.

• taurath

  today at 8:15 PM

  I truly believe if we took a measely $50b out of the LLM world we could create trillion dollar economies from basic research within 10 years. I personally know folks who have intuitive understanding of things that can't get funding to be studied. If we could keep the money away from university upper management, it'd cost $10b max.

  Oh and while we're at it, $20b a year would house every homeless person in the US - there's a hell of a lot of extremely high intelligence and low social cohesion folks who can't handle the extractive punitive system we have. Our ability to deliver opportunity to create lucky situations for ourselves is getting worse and worse

  • eamag

    today at 8:53 PM

    $50B is essentially 100% of the annual NIH budget, which funds the vast majority of JUST life sciences basic research. So you may want to update your beliefs

• vanviegen

  today at 8:01 PM

  Yes! But if science is bottlenecked by funding, making it cheaper might help?

  • woeirua

    today at 8:10 PM

    Not really. Grad students are already essentially working for free.

    • tjwebbnorfolk

      today at 8:22 PM

      How many lavishly-paid deans and bureaucrats and administrators are employed for each grad student?

• gtirloni

  today at 8:00 PM

  LLMs can't materialize funds or political will so let's stick to running GPUs hot and publishing papers. The citations will be amazing. /s

This is very cool. It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery. So often we find things that are "this could have been done 20 years ago" and with an indefatigable searcher perhaps we'll close all those things. Though it does remind me of that Ted Chiang (I think) story where humans and superhumans coexist and all the science of the former is meta-studies of the work of the latter.

• PaulDavisThe1st

  today at 5:17 PM

  > It might be a new scientific revolution to have computer-driven discovery.

  And ... it might not.

  • arjie

    today at 5:17 PM

    True, nothing might be anything. But I'm an optimist :)

  • jbmchuck

    today at 7:22 PM

    Sure - and knowing what is not possible with current tech is a nice datapoint to have.

Someone who left DeepMind over Google's agreement to provide military AI to the US government tried to get Jeff Dean to quit too:

https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind

Maybe this is what happens when someone with Jeff Dean's standing tries to quit?

TBH, I'd rather have Jeff Dean working on the creepiest-possible tech for ICE than joining the race to automate AI research. Automating AI research is terrifying.

• tokioyoyo

  today at 6:59 PM

  If you check out some sub-tweets from people in the org, it wasn't really all butterflies internally for a while. Sorry, really don't want to name people and give examples.

• asadm

  today at 6:50 PM

  > Automating AI research is terrifying.

  what why?

Jeff Dean, Sanjay, et al have achieved so much. I'm very happy for them. Truly deserving.

Sometimes I couldn't resist wondering if I'll ever do work that has a tenth of the impact of theirs.

• jimbokun

  today at 8:33 PM

  > Between us, we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.

  Not a bad combined CV.

• nullsanity

  today at 5:55 PM

  [dead]

• gosub100

  today at 6:11 PM

  Gemini has done absolutely nothing for me. I can't even shut off the navigation feature on my phone using only hands free, when I get close to my destination. I have to take my eyes off the road, look down, and tap to exit.

  Google's advanced AI cannot even exit a mobile app.

  • parthdesai

    today at 8:49 PM

    How does this comment relate to the parent comment?

  • allthetime

    today at 6:19 PM

    Antigravity + Gemini Pro absolutely RIPS through fullstack react + react-native apps / systems. I pay ~$20/month and I basically don't have to do my real work anymore. My time is freed up to learn systems programming and blender.

    • qlte

      today at 6:48 PM

      Oh nice have things stabilized with models/quotas and Antigravity is usable with the Pro plan again? I was getting a crazy amount of value out of Gemini CLI for “free” on my Pro plan but after the shutdown struggled to make agy work with the updated quotas/bigger models without instantly being rate limited and just started doing everything on Codex/Opencode Go.

      I should give it another try…

      • allthetime

        today at 6:59 PM

        Yeah can't remember how long ago but it was running out after less than an hour - then they announced they were loosening restrictions and I've been able to easily get everything I need to done without hitting limits.

        I don't do huge automatic project wide hands-off agent loops though. I spent a lot of time architecting my systems to be easy to generate code on top of with pointed & detailed prompts. So I'm not abusing context... YMMV

  • 16bytes

    today at 6:50 PM

    Jeff and Sanjay's contributions far predate LLMs and influence far outside of Google.

    Jeff was a ACM Fellow in 2009 and published the massively influential MapReduce paper in 2004.

I wonder if Jeff Dean facts [1] (I hope people remember the reference) will carry over to the new startup.

[1] https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts

• hoyd

  today at 5:00 PM

  «Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi.»

  I had not read this before, but told many students the same about my PIN code and I a quiz about the last digits. Love it.

  • soVeryTired

    today at 5:21 PM

    0000 in base pi. Oh Jeff.

• today at 4:39 PM

• tcp_handshaker

  today at 5:32 PM

  Those are all fake, part of an internal Google narrative that overstates individual contribution, and obscures the work of large engineering teams.

  Here are some Jeff Dean well sourced facts:

  - Already part of engineering of Google indexing systems that lacked basic checksums and ran on non-ECC hardware, allowing silent data corruption.

  - One of the authors of LevelDB a database with so many documented crash-consistency, recovery, and data-loss weaknesses for years. Just check their Github project. LevelDB current tracker contains unresolved crash consistency, recovery and corruption reports going back almost 12 years on GitHub

  - In AI engineering technical lead, let TensorFlow lose researcher mind share to PyTorch, and caused Google fragmented landscape across TensorFlow and JAX.

  - Had the people at Google who invented the Transformer architecture, but failed, to turn that lead into the first dominant public LLM.

  - As AI engineering and VP management let Google Brain and DeepMind remain duplicated and internally competitive for too long.

  - Let Noam Shazeer leave and then spent heavily to bring him back with nothing to show for.

  - Part of Technical VP leadership who had Bard rushed to launch with factual errors in Google own promotional material.

  - The first Gemini demonstration overstated how real-time and interactive the system actually was, being basically a fake.

  - Part of the VP and AI technical leadership who had Google AI Overviews launched with weak source quality controls and repeated satire and low-quality web content as factual advice.

  - Part of teams that launched AlphaChip performance claims that were difficult for outside researchers to reproduce and remain technically disputed.

  - Jeff Dean public explanation of Gebru departure was contested and damaged confidence in Google scientific governance.

  - Jeff Dean was part of the team at Google that removed or marginalized prominent internal AI ethics critics shortly before many of their warnings became product problems.

  - Jeff Dean was one of the managers behind Project Dragonfly supporting censorship.

  - Jeff Dean is part of the VP technical leadership approving Project Nimbus supporting an ongoing genocide.

  • shawn_w

    today at 6:01 PM

    I suppose you think Chuck Norris Facts are fake too.

  • today at 5:45 PM

  • bonsai_bar

    today at 5:51 PM

    You sound like you're quite jealous of him.

    • root-parent

      today at 6:04 PM

      I had never heard of many of these, was surprised, went to research, and so far, the list seems correct.

    • dekhn

      today at 6:30 PM

      Actually the list is technically accurate. So maybe it's sour grapes, but it's correct sour grapes.

    • twister2920

      today at 6:04 PM

      not sure how you got that from a long list of criticisms

I’ve always felt that the idea that science is bottlenecked and therefore needs more automation only works for a very narrow definition of what science is, and entails a very specific view on what it should be.

• hobofan

  today at 5:05 PM

  > only works for a very narrow definition of what science is

  And so does academia. It's just that instead of AI and robotics, PhD students are thrown onto problems that are in large parts slightly tweaked reconfigurations of similar experiments.

  Especially in chemistry, biochemistry, material sciences there is a large space of discoveries that are barely "novel" in an intellectually stimulating way, but still highly valuable that can be explored orders of magnitudes faster than is currently the case.

  • stephantul

    today at 5:27 PM

    That is true, I’ve seen people do biochemistry and geology work, and it did look very mind-numbing.

    Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.

    • roughly

      today at 6:12 PM

      > Then again, gassing rats and taking biopsies is not something you can do with AI.

      Also, like, let’s maybe _not_ make the “gassing and cutting living organisms open” AI? Let’s just leave that particular genie in its bottle?

    • smcg

      today at 6:55 PM

      Unfortunately, that's most of science. I don't see these AI systems doing reproducible experiments in "meatspace" any time soon.

  • porridgeraisin

    today at 5:24 PM

    Yep. A communications professor where I did my MS says a 200usd/mo claude sub (which ant gives for free) does as much work as 5 grad students. It's mostly like you said, trying out new ideas rapidly.

    • teamonkey

      today at 6:26 PM

      The purpose of hiring grad students isn’t to advance science, it’s to train experts.

      • porridgeraisin

        today at 7:37 PM

        Yes. They have grad students too. This is just like having more grad students that don't need to be trained so the work you can get done is not bottlenecked by the number of people you can train.

      • pickleRick243

        today at 7:04 PM

        It's 90% to advance science via cheap labor and 10% to train a small group of future experts who will hire grad students to 90% advance science via cheap labor etc. ...

• tcp_handshaker

  today at 5:16 PM

  Lets keep your comment out of the VC pitch deck shall we?

• today at 5:07 PM

This is one of the interesting aspects the 'AI job loss' community doesn't account for. As the technology unlocks things, more startups are created. And even at a lower nominal engineer-to-work ratio, overall demand for talent still goes up. Ultimately, we are not a single group trying to achieve a common outcome, we are a collection of many groups trying to compete against each other.

• throwaway0123_5

  today at 7:12 PM

  What percentage of people work at a startup though? Not just new/small business, which could include restaurants, local services, etc., but tech/science startups that would meaningfully benefit from AI.

  I'd bet you could 10x the number and still be in low single digit percentages of the US workforce. And it seems pretty likely that AI-enabled startups will also employ less people per-startup.

  If AI causes a white-collar jobs apocalypse, I don't think startups are picking up the slack, although it'll plausibly cushion the blow somewhat for top-performing tech workers.

Discovery and optimization are very different processes. Optimization is the process of finding the shortest path to a goal. Discovery is the process of stumbling on new goals and redrawing the map of what's possible.

Ambitious goals and new discoveries happen via novelty-based search. Progress in scientific discovery is measured by how different/interesting the outcomes are, not by closeness to a predetermined goal.

Discovery is a creative search that preserves optionality, whereas optimization restricts optionality. In other words, you usually don't discover anything novel unless you're trying new things that don't appear connected to the goal in the first place. Would an ML optimization loop have discovered transformers?

For sure made with Claude code for front end, but I’m excited to see where they go

The site itself is really leaning into the “made with Fable” aesthetic

• pelagicAustral

  today at 5:27 PM

  Why are people so sour about this?? I can read the site easily, its clear, performs well on mobile, what else do you want? Why is so offensive to people that models trained on tailwind or whatever?

  • throwaway0123_5

    today at 7:21 PM

    Some parts are pretty annoying to read... the paragraph beginning in "Our mission is straightforward:" has many lines with just 2-3 words, massive font, and tons of unused whitespace to the right. Changing the page/browser zoom doesn't seem to help much either.

  • DaiPlusPlus

    today at 7:01 PM

    > Why are people so sour about this?

    To many people, myself included, who have to wade through huge amounts of low-quality AI slop which is actually a negative value: no-one benefits when non-experts fire-off one-shot LLM/agent prompts to produce PRs, reports, documentation or "journalism" riddled with imagined truth and factual errors - and the more that people like me have to evaluate these inputs for our job and how wrong they are it pisses us off - but also it means we pick-up on the hallmarks, tells and cliches of these low-effort, no-respect submissions - and now the litany of tells includes this beige-themed, blurred-backdrop-navbar corporate website look: theirs site looks like the 4 or so other LLM-generated, negative-value slop-farm sites I've wasted time on recently - all over the past few weeks.

    So I'm saying that, without having known anything about what "Discovery Loop" is - or is not - but landing on their site and and seeing that beige colour and blurred-backdrop navbar, I immediately moved to close the tab; what kept me here was seeing the HN thread had over 100 comments by now and read more about it; if not for that then I wouldn't have given it further thought.

    Having "that" beige site look with same the overused looks is either an unintentional indication that the site's author used a low-effort AI prompt to generate the site and that the content within is likely to be low-quality, low-value - or it's an intentional lure to appeal to those who uncritically share in the AI psychosis and so, I assume, are a good target to seek investment from even if it means losing the audience of cynical Internet critics like myself because they know people like me won't be breathlessly repeating their vision-statement on LinkedIn and throwing money at them - kinda like how scam emails intentionally include mistakes for better audience selection. And both possibilities have unpleasant implications.

    ------

    Anyway, regardless of the background of the team behind it, the way the project is described sounds exactly like the recursive-self-improvement and simulated-science thought-experiments from _that other website_ - it's the kind of thing I expect Angela Collier to brutally takedown in an amusing video.

  • today at 5:34 PM

  • slopinthebag

    today at 5:33 PM

    Because it’s lame and aesthetics matter.

  • make3

    today at 5:30 PM

    it's just a low effort snark comment, don't overthink it

  • swalsh

    today at 5:30 PM

    If this was a design firm, it might matter. But this is mostly a hiring ad for engineers, and a landing page for VC. I'd judge them more if they actually put effort into it.

• npilk

  today at 6:05 PM

  If their goal is to automate scientific discovery, why would they not automate building their website?

  (Though, I do wish people would use just a few extra prompts to break out of the 'vibe-coded' look.)

• swalsh

  today at 5:29 PM

  let me rephrase that:

  "The site itself demonstrates the team is spending their money in the places that matter, and using quick solutions for the stuff they need but isn't mission critical"

  • lrae

    today at 7:11 PM

    You could rephrase that again I guess:

    "The team of AI pioneers lacks the basic prompt-writing capability to make their marketing landing page not look like AI slop."

    I, personally, don't hate it. It's a decently clean site, but it does invoke those thoughts in me too.

• IshKebab

  today at 5:33 PM

  At least it isn't dark purple.

Two to keep in mind with these kinds of things -

1. There’s some irreducible costs in terms of time and material in the physical world that are not amenable to the kind of optimization or parallelization or even just the raw speedup from Moore’s law or computational architecture improvements we’re used to with software. My experience is primarily in biology, where the examples here are things like “it takes 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate” - it has taken 20 minutes for E. coli to replicate for a billion years, and next year it will still take E. coli 20 minutes to replicate, no matter how good your software stack is. Similarly, it takes X amount of energy to grow enough E. coli to produce a meaningful result, and that energy costs money, whether it’s in the form of glycerine or heat or whatever you want, and that also won’t materially reduce in the same kinds of “orders of magnitude” sense we’re used to from software, which is what we’re usually expecting to make the economics of these things work out.

2. Complicating the above, physical systems are phenomenally multivariate - far, far more than you think, and biological systems especially are just unbelievably complex - which means the number of experiments and the length and duration of those experiments you need to run to get enough data to be reasonably confident you’re seeing genuine signal is Way higher than you think.

Combine those two things and what you get is a money furnace, even before you get to the AI model training part, which is Also a money furnace. There’s low hanging fruits in all this, there’s areas where automating the approach can be really valuable, but typically the moment you turn this machine on, you’re gonna start burning money at a rate that would embarrass a finance bro on a coke bender, and that’s effectively unavoidable because the real world is not amenable to software’s scaling laws.

I have used something similar. I set up a team of agents that researches, proposes, builds and audits. Then rinse and repeat. I have used it for different topics. It hasn’t made me a millionaire, but I haven’t lost money either - so that’s some sort of win, right? But I would not have been able to ideate, test at that speed and quality without an LLM.

• skinfaxi

  today at 8:38 PM

  > It hasn’t made me a millionaire, but I haven’t lost money either - so that’s some sort of win, right?

  I'm curious if that is before or after token costs?

> Oriol Vinyals, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff Dean, Quoc Le

as founding members is crazy !

Big news aside, it feels exciting to see them leave and pursue startup. They could have stayed back, and retire

By the middle of the 2030's the world we live in will be unrecognizable.

• kingofthehill98

  today at 5:21 PM

  I agree, for better or for worse.

  If I had to bet my money, it would be on "for worse".

• dude250711

  today at 5:29 PM

  It will not be owned by top 1%?

  • swalsh

    today at 5:32 PM

    That seems to be the one unchanged variable of time.

    • roughly

      today at 6:13 PM

      That’s a policy decision, don’t let them convince you otherwise.

  • warkdarrior

    today at 7:43 PM

    The change is that it'll be owned by the top 0.0000001% who control the LLMs that will be your new boss.

  • minittsnet

    today at 6:46 PM

    [dead]

Discovery systems are making a comeback huh.

Oh wow, that's a blow to Google, what's with the talent scarcity in ML. Though if this goes anywhere Google will likely buy them back.

• jfrbfbreudh

  today at 5:04 PM

  Google is backing it.

• today at 5:09 PM

• FailMore

  today at 5:10 PM

  Google down $160Bn so far since the leaving announcements. Those are some valuable people!

  • IAmGraydon

    today at 5:17 PM

    Google is literally at the same stock price it was on Monday. This is a normal daily fluctuation for them.

> we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.

holy shit. I've known this, but...

This looks like a realization of "benevolent self conscious AIs agreeing to cooperate with mankind to do great stuff". Often in these tales, there is a hidden cost to it: the AI has its own agenda, or does crazy experiments with humans mind/brain. I'm wondering what shape will take that plot twist in reality :)

What's the business model of these startups?

Did the ycombinator podcast which included giving advice to startup founders just a few days ago:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Vy-jeff-dean-the-1-rule-...

• xnx

  today at 5:01 PM

  As always, a very good presentation.

Is it a very hard problem to solve that jeff and the other legendary engineers have decided to quit and start on this?

• thisoneworks

  today at 6:39 PM

  I mean what are they doing right now at Google? Optimizing data centres? Pretty lame compared to this. Even if they completely fail, i'm sure there'll be good lessons.

Careers page (if anyone is interested) → https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Discovery-Loop

• brcmthrowaway

  today at 5:34 PM

  I don't see the salary (on mobile). Isn't there a law stating it must be added?

  • guessmyname

    today at 5:42 PM

    Only California employers with 15 or more employees have to post a pay range (Senate Bill 1162 [1], effective Jan 1, 2023) [2][3]. Discovery Loop employs only four people (that we know of), so it isn’t required to disclose a salary range in its job posts, of which there is only one [4].

    [1] https://hr.ucmerced.edu/hr-units/talent-acquisition/senate-b...

    [2] https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2023/03/pay-transparency-...

    [3] https://www.jazzhr.com/blog/pay-transparency

    [4] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Discovery-Loop

    • jiveturkey

      today at 8:18 PM

      It's too bad they would follow the letter of the law, and not state the salary anyway. I see that as a negative indicator, regardless of offer size.

This reminds me of Three body problem and how the scientist discovered the high strength wire was through quick physical experiments and use them as input to an AI model to determine if it works.

They're structuring the new company as public benefit corporation.

• an0malous

  today at 5:16 PM

  Does this mean anything besides for corporate virtue signaling?

Automating ML/AI research seems completely tractable. Most of the other claims seem much less doable.

Jesus, he left Google to do what everyone else is already trying to do? He must be so insulated he doesn’t realize what the real world is actually up to. I mean, organizations started on this exact same mission three or four years ago. Or longer. I suppose it’s better to wake up later than never.

National Labs in the US have been doing this for a while now. I feel like the private sector will take the lead soon.

• pphysch

  today at 5:35 PM

  Why? Science is wildly unprofitable on the scale of an individual private firm.

The problem is all these new labs don't have any competitive advanatge amongst each other, talent can only take one so far, though Jeff is a legend no doubt.

Models are commodities the applications eg. BaseTen, OpenRouter should capture the value.

https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/why-openrouter-can-be-the-n...

• compiler-guy

  today at 5:18 PM

  The company is developing an application, or a class of applications. Not a new model.

• make3

  today at 5:31 PM

  I think Google's branding was starting to be too poor in AI to get top talent, they needed the refresh

• malux85

  today at 5:23 PM

  Model routers - send all of your data through a third party who totally swears not to peek at it.

  If youre doing anything high value (advanced research, classified work, high value industrial research, health data) then sending your data through a third party like that is insane.

  • Taikhoom2010

    today at 5:56 PM

    yes perhaps, although I think the best option for a enterprise is to train a model on it's own data.

    • willy_k

      today at 8:31 PM

      Best option by what metric? For which enterprises. I say this having worked at an “enterprise” where this was not a good option. For (lack of) talent/expertise, budget, infrastructure, and actual value relative to the eventual bottom line.

  • adfm

    today at 5:41 PM

    FHE

What a team.

This seems interesting! I wonder how this will play out.

not that it really matters, but is he leaving Google?

This is “google brain”

The job req has "Recursive Self-Improvement" as one of the "area of expertise" checkboxes lol

• paxys

  today at 6:17 PM

  It is targeted at a dozen or so people at OpenAI and Anthropic, not you or me.

  • recursive

    today at 6:51 PM

    Then why is it published on a public website?

Related:

Jeff Dean leaving Alphabet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49184746

I've seen tiny tiny hints from the outside that Jeff Dean was dealing with too much internal BS. Two examples that come to mind: Having to deal with Timnit Gebru fiasco, and even chips in the TPU series getting marketing names (Trillium and Ironwood) before switching back to more standard numbering.

• compiler-guy

  today at 5:06 PM

  I have no doubt that internal Google friction is one of the reasons they are moving. But the Gebru incident was almost seven years ago now. It is very unlikely to be a proximate cause.

  I doubt numbering vs names on TPU releases even crosses Jeff's radar. It's not the kind of thing he cares about.

  • xnx

    today at 8:02 PM

    Yes. I'm not privy to any real insider gossip, but I read all his tweets and watch all his public speeches. He made an offhand comment about the TPU naming. I probably overinterpreted that, but I took it as a sign. There should have been a team around Jeff Dean that acted as an absolute shield for any BS. If Jeff disagrees with anyone at Google outside Sundar/Sergey, the strong onus should be on the other person to justify their stance.

I'm skeptical of any Engineering loop that doesn't include reality (as in touch grass) feedback. Pure logic and reasoning is the domain of Maths and Science (philosophy). Surely it will work, but it will not "be able to solve any learning loop".

• LarsDu88

  today at 5:41 PM

  I'm almost certain the goal of this startup is to make physical automated research labs guided by RL

• XenophileJKO

  today at 5:01 PM

  How is that different than video input?

  • 1970-01-01

    today at 5:07 PM

    There are over 2 dozen known senses to reality. Video input is a fraction of a sense.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense#Artificial_sensation_and...

In 2018 there was a beautiful New Yorker article on Jeff Dean and Sanjay https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

"The speed of light in a vacuum used to be about 35 mph. Then Jeff Dean spent a weekend optimizing physics."

When they say experiments, do they mean using physics simulators?

• danielmarkbruce

  today at 5:48 PM

  in AI/ML, no. They are just going to automate AI/ML research to start with. Totally doable.

  For some of the other things, undoubtably yes.

Computation is not the hard part of discovery.

So Ralph Wiggum in a suit?

I am available for hire.

I smell vapor.

nice

Another way to see this is: a bunch of renowned google engineers realized they can grab some of the VC pie for themselves

https://www.geekwire.com/2026/the-startup-idea-that-convince...

Not through conscience.

The AI designed italics on thin font is hard to not see as slop.

• aaronharnly

  today at 6:54 PM

  You know when the page has all-caps "01 — THE APPROACH" that it is slopified. I guess I shouldn't be astounded, but I am, that world-class talents with world-class backing are just taking default LLM output and saying, "okay looks fine".

  • m3kw9

    today at 7:40 PM

    They would argue they are focused on more important stuff, but marketing shouldn't be underestimated.

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• daishi55

  today at 5:36 PM

  Yeah what these guys are mainly known for is vaporware

  > we have pioneered massive scale computing and led the creation of critical infrastructure, products, and foundational AI advances that the world relies on, including multiple generations of Google Search, Google Ads, Google News, Google Translate, Google File System, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, Pathways, TPUs, AlphaChip, AlphaStar, AlphaCode, AlphaFold, Gemini, model distillation, mixture-of-experts model architectures, word2vec, sequence-to-sequence models, chain of thought reasoning, neural architecture search, and multiple generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) among others.

I wish them well, but this firm will likely fail miserably. The reason is that the value is in having access to real world hardware platforms that AI can control, not in the harness that controls them. There exist plenty of harnesses already. These people couldn't even get Google to build a top LLM. Before you dismiss and downvote, I dare you to counter it.

Is this a joke? Site is not loading for me.

> Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today.

Imagine a future where only the anointed few elite minds can participate in science and engineering. Btw we’re hiring.

Great message!

As LLM coding agents plateau— at least for the average engineer without tens of thousands of dollars or swarms of agents to run —I’d say that, from here on it’s going to be about ASICs, specialized LoRA/or-equivalent models, or a Ruby on Rails for LLM context engineering and orchestration, which LangChain and others seems well position, including Google as they own the entire stack. LLM free lunch has been over for a while, perhaps since the ReAct loop, and has been official since Ilya mentioned it at NeurIPS.

I feel the most exciting development these days is self-evolving agents. Especially if you have a way to verify their outputs with a formal system, or with a system developed since the 60s by armies of PhDs.

DeepMinds Gnome is a good example, where they use DFT to verify outputs. Approximating NP-problems is always fun for those who dare.

I am also building in this space. Its a mix between HPC, AI, and hard science. Pretty fun compared to waking everyday to LLM news that seem more like marketing stunts.

• aoeusnth1

  today at 5:00 PM

  Sounds like you get your news from 2024 when people thought things were plateauing after GPT4?

• zuzululu

  today at 4:55 PM

  we definitely haven't hit plateau yet. I think a lot of people latch on to anti-LLM narratives without really thinking things through.

• deeviant

  today at 4:49 PM

  LLM coding isn't even close to plateauing. Right now, the major players are in a consolidation step, focusing more on economic efficiency but still not at the point where we're ready to start burning models to hardware and freezing the line.

  They are straddling the line between pushing it forward, and justifying the business case. It's hard to do both at the same time.

  • calufa

    today at 5:03 PM

    LLMs are hungry for tokens. Every day I see more startups claiming token usage at 50-100k per month. You can always brute-force your way in - just see HuggingFace's recent attacks.

    If throwing more money at inference while accumulating compounding technical debt is the new norm, then we are not solving the problem, and the solution space is already covered.

    Perhaps there are marginal gains at the expense of quadrillion-params LLM models with 10x the cost and energy. We are simply making inefficiency more expensive, camouflaged by VC money and great marketing.

    If that is not plateauing, then I guess I will have to reconsider what plateauing means.

    • bpodgursky

      today at 6:19 PM

      > You can always brute-force your way in

      This is such unbelievable revisionism! Can you imagine in 2022 saying "Oh of course you can brute force your way to AGI if you spend enough money per month". Nobody thought that! Come on!