DeepMind’s Existential Crisis

There is a civil war happening at Google DeepMind. The CEO, Demis Hassabis, is out there telling everyone that AGI—human-level intelligence—is coming in a few years. He’s basically John Connor but with a better haircut. But then, one of his top scientists just published a paper saying, 'Actually, LLMs will never have consciousness. They’re just fancy math.'

Can you imagine the office Christmas party? Demis is like, 'To the future of our digital souls!' and the scientist is in the back like, 'It’s a rock, Demis! It’s just a rock that we taught how to spell!' It’s like a magician’s assistant standing in the middle of the show shouting, 'He’s not actually sawing me in half, there’s just another girl in the box!' Google is trying to sell us a God in a Cloud, and their own employees are like, 'It’s not God, it’s just a very aggressive Autocomplete with a Google Calendar integration.'