The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind Documentary
53 points
1 hour ago
| 7 comments
| thinkinggamefilm.com
| HN
nightski
6 minutes ago
[-]
In my experience all DeepMind content ends up being a puff piece for Dennis Hassabis. It's like his personal marketing engine lol.
reply
incognito124
54 minutes ago
[-]
Watched it a while ago. Made me seriously think about AI and what we should use it for. I feel like all the entertainment use cases (image and video gen) are a complete waste.
reply
mattlondon
28 minutes ago
[-]
The chatbots and image editors are just a side-show. The real value is coming in e.g. chemistry (Alpha fold etc all), fusion research, weather prediction etc.
reply
threethirtytwo
18 minutes ago
[-]
Why are images and video a complete waste? This makes no sense to me.

Right now the generators aren’t effective but they are definitely stepping stones to something better in the future.

If that future thing produces video, movies and pictures better than anything humanity can produce at a rate faster than we can produce things… how is that a waste?

It can arguably be bad for society but definitely not a waste.

reply
incognito124
3 minutes ago
[-]
Let me phrase it a bit differently, then: AI generated cats in Ghibli style are a waste, education-style infographics are OK. I did not hold that opinion before the documentary
reply
jeffbee
37 minutes ago
[-]
DeepMind's new [edit: apparently now old] weather forecast model is similar in architecture to the toys that generate videos of horses addressing Congress or cats wearing sombreros. The technology moves forward and while some of the new applications are not important, other applications of the same technology may be important.
reply
incognito124
6 minutes ago
[-]
Is it really similar? I was under the impression it's a GNN of a (really dense) polyhedron, not a diffusion model
reply
jeffbee
3 minutes ago
[-]
GenCast is a diffusion model, but it is not the "new" one like I said. Apparently there is another one. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10772
reply
redbell
9 minutes ago
[-]
Just watched it yesterday and enjoyed every second of it, the director put more focus on Demis Hassabis which turns out to be a true superhero and I have to confess that I am probably admiring him more that any other human in the tech industry.
reply
dwarfpagent
36 minutes ago
[-]
I find it funny that the YouTube link takes you to the film, but like an hour into it.
reply
ChrisArchitect
59 minutes ago
[-]
reply
ChrisArchitect
54 minutes ago
[-]
Hard to discount the impact of AlphaFold in science work but submitting this to a number of film festivals like Tribeca seems a bit AI-washing.
reply
DrierCycle
1 hour ago
[-]
AlphaFold is optimization, not thinking. Propaganda 'r us.
reply
fredoliveira
53 minutes ago
[-]
Did you watch the documentary? Would probably fare better if you did, because it'd give you the context for the film title.
reply
DrierCycle
46 minutes ago
[-]
I'm an hour into it, unconvinced.

The illusion that agency 'emerges' from rules like games, is fundamentally absurd.

This is the foundational illusion of mechanics. It's UFOlogy not science.

reply
fredoliveira
44 minutes ago
[-]
Well, two things: it's the last sentence of the film; being on hour into something you're calling propaganda is brave.

Anyways. I thought the documentary was inspiring. Deepmind are the only lab that has historically prioritized science over consumer-facing product (that's changing now, however). I think their work with AlphaFold is commendable.

reply
DrierCycle
35 minutes ago
[-]
It's science under the creative boundary of binary/symbols. And as analog thinkers, we should be developing far greater tools than these glass ceilings. And yes, having finished the film, it's far more propagandic than it began as.

Science is exceeding the envelop of paradox, and what I see here is obeying the envelope in order to justify the binary as a path to AGI. It's not a path. The symbol is a bottleneck.

reply
Zigurd
16 minutes ago
[-]
Everything between your years is an electrochemical process. It's all math and there is no "creative boundary." There's plenty to criticize in AI hype that we're going to get to machine intelligence very soon. I suspect a lot of the hype is oriented towards getting favorable treatment from the government if not outright subsidies. But claiming that there are fundamental barriers is a losing bet.
reply
DrierCycle
7 minutes ago
[-]
It doesn't happen "btwn ears" and math is an illusion of imprecision. The fundamental barrier is frameworks and computers will not be involved. There will be software obviously. But it will never be computed.
reply
amitport
34 minutes ago
[-]
Plenty *commercial* labs frequently prioritized pure science over *immediate* consumer products, but none done so out of charity. Deepmind included.
reply
Zigurd
20 minutes ago
[-]
Your mind emerges from a network of neurons. Machine models are probably far from enabling that kind of emergence, but if what's going on between our ears isn't computation, it's magic.
reply
DrierCycle
12 minutes ago
[-]
It's not magic. It's neural syntax. And nothing trapped by computation is occurring. It's not a model, it is the world as actions.

The computer is a hand-me-down tool under evolution's glass ceiling. This should be obvious: binary, symbols, metaphors. These are toys (ie they are models), and humans are in our adolescent stage using these toys.

Only analog correlation gets us to agency and thought.

reply
MattRix
41 minutes ago
[-]
Is there a fundamental difference between it and true agency/thought? I’m not so sure.
reply
DrierCycle
37 minutes ago
[-]
Agency will emerge from exceeding the bottleneck of evolution's hand-me-down tools: binary, symbols, metaphors. As long as these unconscious sportscasters for thought "explain" to us what thought "is", we are trapped. DeepMind is simply another circular hamster wheel of evolution. Just look at the status-propaganda the film heightens in order to justify the magic.
reply
aschla
58 minutes ago
[-]
reply
DrierCycle
53 minutes ago
[-]
reply
dwa3592
55 minutes ago
[-]
what is thinking?
reply
DrierCycle
48 minutes ago
[-]
Sharp wave ripples, nested oscillations, cohering at action-syntax. The brain is "about actions" and lacks representations.
reply
__patchbit__
46 minutes ago
[-]
Creatively peeling the hyper dimensional space in the scope of simplectic geometry, markhov blanket and helmholtz invariance????
reply