Top all-time · #65
Google DeepMind
Company blog · deepmind.com/blogaiscience
Google DeepMind is the company blog at deepmind.com, writing about ai and science. Since 2014, 505 different Hacker News readers have linked it 776 times, most often “WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link DeepMind's blog and research pages as sources for its AI results, such as AlphaGo, AlphaStar, WaveNet, AlphaFold, and data-centre cooling savings, usually to support their own points.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter called the AlphaStar post's point that AlphaStar's lower APM is a real insight, noting the APM limits are unnecessary.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Artificial intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. We research and build safe artificial intelligence systems. We're committed to solving intelligence, to advance science and …
Most-linked posts?
- WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio31 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2016-09-08
- DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%19 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2016-09-30
- Competitive Programming with AlphaCode18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2022-05-17
- Differentiable Neural Computers15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2016-10-12
- AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-11-30
- DeepMind RT-2, a transformer based robotic control model10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2023-07-28
- DeepMind: A Generalist Agent10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2022-05-12
- AlphaDev discovers faster sorting algorithms9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-06-07
- DeepMind: Optimal training of large language models8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-04-12
- AlphaFold: Using AI for Scientific Discovery8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-01-15
What Hacker News says?
> the only thing I really see being possible is if some other technology came along and superseded "Internet search" as a category. Free natural language search, based on dialogue. A cross between GPT-3 and web search. ( https://deepmind.com/research/publications/2021/improving-la... )
Comment linking /research/publications/2021/improving-language-models-by-retrieving-from-trillions-of-tokens
on “Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories”Submitted AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology as a story · 1473 points
HN discussionI found that it confuses subject with object: do you want A for B or B for A. It's all the same. Maybe Google doesn't really use neural nets in ranking, or they are a joke. Desktop web search is trending down, voice and mobile interfaces up. They should be focusing hard on direct question answering based on retrieved web pages. A recent paper by Deep Mind shows how it can be done, not that it matters, they won't jum…
Comment linking /research/publications/2021/improving-language-models-by-retrieving-from-trillions-of-tokens
on “Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories”Submitted AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology as a story · 1398 points
HN discussionDeepmind's StarCraft AIs are already competing at the Grandmaster level[0], which is the highest tier of competitive play and represents the top 0.6 % of competitors. I am pleasantly surprised by how quickly they have been tackling big new decision spaces. [0] https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-leve...
Comment linking /blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-level-in-StarCraft-II-using-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning
on “John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence”Submitted AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch as a story · 923 points
HN discussionSpecially to point 4, google pushed their wavenet paper a couple months ago. I wouldn't be surprised if some, if not all of these current break throughs are built on that foundation. This sort of application was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the paper. https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
Comment linking /blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/
on “Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone”Submitted DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment as a story · 917 points
HN discussionprobably this one: https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
Comment linking /blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/
on “Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone”Submitted AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II as a story · 805 points
HN discussionWell, the question is, do they just need to throw more computational power / training at this algorithm or is that the peak of their implementation? This is something Google has been working a lot on [1] and Baidu also recently posted about their results too [2]. We're definitely pretty close to passing the human detectable level. [1] https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio... [2] http://researc…
Comment linking /blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/
on “Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone”Submitted Competitive Programming with AlphaCode as a story · 678 points
HN discussionOnly the energy cost savings google got from Deepmind probably already makes it a very profitable acquisition https://deepmind.com/blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces-google...
Comment linking /blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-40
on “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology”Submitted AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe as a story · 633 points
HN discussionDid AlphaFold2 also have the biggest budget? :) Edit: from the other HN article on this topic: > We trained this system on publicly available data consisting of ~170,000 protein structures from the protein data bank together with large databases containing protein sequences of unknown structure. It uses approximately 128 TPUv3 cores (roughly equivalent to ~100-200 GPUs) run over a few weeks https://deepmind.com/blog…
Comment linking /blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology
on “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology”Submitted WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio as a story · 627 points
HN discussionhttps://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-...
Comment linking /blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology
on “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology”Submitted DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment as a story · 603 points
HN discussionThanks for the answer! I guess my lack of knowledge in the field shines through. Continuous learning is apparently under active research at the moment, and this blog post about it [0] is less than two months old, so your intuition was right. If I were to guess the secret sauce I'd say that a mirror might be involved. Is depth information not worth the trouble for these kinds of classification problems? [0] https://d…
Comment linking /blog/enabling-continual-learning-in-neural-networks/
on “Show HN: Sorting Two Metric Tons of Lego”Submitted Neural scene representation and rendering as a story · 545 points
HN discussionOur paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature1... Video from Nature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-dKXOlsf98&feature=youtu.be Video from us at DeepMind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUbqykXVx0A edit: For those saying it's still a long way to beat the strongest player - we are playing Lee Sedol, probably the strongest Go player, in March: http://deepmind.com/alpha-go.html . That site a…
Comment linking /alpha-go.html
on “Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion”Submitted DeepMind: A Generalist Agent as a story · 502 points
HN discussion> Imagine for a moment if FB and Google took all their developers and resources... It's a nice thought exercise, but of course not realistic. FAANGs wouldn't be able to attract or retain the talent if they were purely in scientific medical research (where do you think those fancy offices and fat paychecks comes from?). Having said that, it doesn't have to be either/or. I strongly believe that companies can be succes…
Comment linking /blog/real-world-challenges-for-agi
on ““Amateur” programmer fought cancer with 50 Nvidia Geforce 1080Ti”Submitted WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant as a story · 463 points
HN discussionICYMI, DeepMind partnered with Blizzard to do this for StarCraft II: https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-star...
Comment linking /blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-starcraft-ii-ai-research-environment/
on “OpenAI Universe”Submitted Controlling the nuclear fusion plasma in a tokamak with reinforcement learning as a story · 443 points
HN discussion"It" can reduce power consumption by 15%. https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce... Just because alpha zero doesn't solve the problem you want it to doesn't mean that advancements aren't being made that matter to someone else. To ignore that seems disingenuous.
Comment linking /blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-40/
on “AI winter is well on its way”Submitted Open Source Datasets as a story · 397 points
HN discussionThe brain has a number of functional parts that we don't understand all that well. Research on the brain hits a wall every now and then, but you never hear the phrase "Neuroscience Winter". We're starting to train models that match biological brain behavior, at least in some crude functional/structural sense. Maybe this is just a string of coincidences, but my guess is that discoveries of analogous biological/model…
Comment linking /blog/grid-cells/
on “AI winter is well on its way”Submitted AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery as a story · 363 points
HN discussion
