[HN Gopher] The Thinking Game Film - Google DeepMind documentary
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The Thinking Game Film - Google DeepMind documentary
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-11-30 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thinkinggamefilm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thinkinggamefilm.com)
| DrierCycle wrote:
| AlphaFold is optimization, not thinking. Propaganda 'r us.
| aschla wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| DrierCycle wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203562
| dwa3592 wrote:
| what is thinking?
| DrierCycle wrote:
| Sharp wave ripples, nested oscillations, cohering at action-
| syntax. The brain is "about actions" and lacks
| representations.
| __patchbit__ wrote:
| Creatively peeling the hyper dimensional space in the scope
| of simplectic geometry, markhov blanket and helmholtz
| invariance????
| fredoliveira wrote:
| Did you watch the documentary? Would probably fare better if
| you did, because it'd give you the context for the film title.
| DrierCycle wrote:
| 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.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| 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.
| DrierCycle wrote:
| 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.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Everything between your ears 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.
| DrierCycle wrote:
| 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.
| amitport wrote:
| Plenty *commercial* labs frequently prioritized pure
| science over *immediate* consumer products, but none done
| so out of charity. Deepmind included.
| MattRix wrote:
| Is there a fundamental difference between it and true
| agency/thought? I'm not so sure.
| DrierCycle wrote:
| 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.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| DrierCycle wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| Why is it absurd? Because believing that would break some
| deep delusion humans have about themselves?
| Rochus wrote:
| Not sure why this is downvoted. The comment cuts to the core of
| the "Intelligence vs. Curve-Fitting" debate. From my humble
| perspective as a PhD in the molecular biology /biophysics field
| you are fundamentally correct: AlphaFold is optimization
| (curve-fitting), not thinking. But calling it "propaganda"
| might be a slight oversimplification of why that optimization
| is useful. If you ask AlphaFold to predict a protein that
| violates the laws of physics (e.g. a designed sequence with
| impossible steric clashes), it will sometimes still confidently
| predict a folded structure because it is optimizing for
| "looking like a protein", not for "obeying physics". The
| "Propaganda" label likely comes from DeepMind's marketing,
| which uses words like "Solved"; instead, DeepMind found a way
| to bypass the protein folding problem.
| DrierCycle wrote:
| I'm concerned that coders and the general public will confuse
| optimization with intelligence. That's the nature of
| propaganda, substituting sleight of hand to create a false
| narrative.
|
| btw an excellent explanation, thank you.
| autonomousErwin wrote:
| What's the difference between optimisation and
| intelligence?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| For a start optimization is a process, and intelligence
| is a capability.
| dekhn wrote:
| If there's one thing I wish DeepMind did less of, it's
| conflating the protein folding problem with static structure
| prediction. The former is a grand challenge problem that
| remains 'unsolved' while the latter is an impressive
| achievment that really is optimization using a huge
| collection of prior knowledge. I've told John Moult, the
| organizer of CASP this (I used to "compete" in these things),
| and I think most people know he's overstating the
| significance of static structure prediction.
|
| Also, solving the protein folding problem (or getting to 100%
| accuracy on structure prediction) would not really move the
| needle in terms of curing diseases. These sorts of
| simplifications are great if you're trying to inspire
| students into a field of science, but get in the way when you
| are actually trying to rationally allocate a research budget
| for drug discovery.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think if you watch the actual film you'd find they don't
| claim AlphaFold is thinking.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It seems that to solve the protein folding problem in a
| fundamental way would require solving chemistry, yet the big
| lie (or false hope) of reductionism is that discovering the
| fundamental laws of the universe such as quantum theory
| doesn't in fact help that much with figuring out the
| laws/dynamics at higher levels of abstraction such as
| chemistry.
|
| So, in the meantime (or perhaps for ever), we look for
| patterns rather than laws, with neural nets being one of the
| best tools we have available to do this.
|
| Of course ANNs need massive amounts of data to "generalize"
| well, while protein folding only had a small amount available
| due to the months of effort needed to experimentally discover
| how any protein is folded, so DeepMind threw the kitchen sink
| at the problem, apparently using a diffusion like process in
| AlphaFold 3 to first determine large scale structure then
| refine it, and using co-evolution of proteins as another
| source of data to address the paucity.
|
| So, OK, they found a way around our lack of knowledge of
| chemistry and managed to get an extremely useful result all
| the same. The movie, propaganda or not, never suggested
| anything different, and "at least 90% correct" was always the
| level at which it was understood the result would be useful,
| even if 100% based on having solved chemistry / molecular
| structure would be better.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but AlphaFold is still probably the most impactful and
| positive thing to have come out of "Deep Learning" so far.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Streaming on YouTube now:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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_.
| llbbdd wrote:
| What is AI-washing?
| incognito124 wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| incognito124 wrote:
| Is it really similar? I was under the impression it's a GNN
| of a (really dense) polyhedron, not a diffusion model
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| None of that has reached the market yet. If it was up to the
| sciences alone, AI couldn't bear the weight of its own costs.
|
| It also needs to be vertically integrated to make money,
| otherwise it's a handout to the materials science company. I
| can't see any of the AI companies stretching themselves that
| thin. So they give it away for goodwill or good PR.
| incognito124 wrote:
| That's not really true. Commercial weather prediction has
| reached the market, and a drug (sorry, can't find the new s
| link) that was found by AI-accelerated drug discovery is
| now in clinical testing
| poszlem wrote:
| The real value is coming in warfare.
| awaythrow999 wrote:
| Right. More accurate predictions for meta-data based
| killings which as championed by US in their war on terror
| walletdrainer wrote:
| Metadata based killings are most likely a huge
| improvement from the prior state of affairs
| modeless wrote:
| Yeah. Let the leaders assassinate each other with drone
| strikes instead of indiscriminately bombing whole cities
| as they used to.
| dylan604 wrote:
| what gov't in modern day would fall because the leader
| was assassinated? the next in line would just step up,
| and now have a pissed population that will be in favor of
| ratcheting up beyond assassinations.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| 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.
| incognito124 wrote:
| Let me phrase it a bit differently, then: AI generated cats
| in Ghibli style are a waste, we should definitely do less of
| that. I did not hold that opinion before the documentary
|
| Education-style infographics and videos are OK.
| danielbln wrote:
| I'm glad you're not the sole arbiter for what is wasteful
| and what isn't.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just because you disagree does not make them wrong though
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| I'm not even talking about this. Those cat videos are just
| stepping stones for academy award winning masterpieces of
| cinema like dune. All generated by AI on a click in one
| second.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Parent said "entertainment use cases" are a complete waste,
| not all uses of images and video. I don't agree, but do
| particularly find educational use cases of AI video are
| becoming compelling.
|
| I help people turn wire rolling shelf racks into the base of
| their home studio, and AI can now create a "how to attach
| something to a wire shelf rack" without me having to do all
| the space and rack and equipment and lighting and video
| setup, and just use a prompt. It's not close to perfect yet,
| but it's becoming useful.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| If AI can produce movies, video and art better aka "more
| entertaining" then humans than how is it a waste?
| wasmainiac wrote:
| But it's not. I think most can agree that there really
| has not been any real entertainment from genAI beyond
| novelty crap like seeing Lincoln pulling a nice track at
| a skate park. No one wants to watch genAI slop video, no
| one wants to listen to genAI video essays, most people do
| not want to read genAI blog posts. Music is a maybe,
| based on leaderboards, but it is not like we ever had a
| lack of music to listen to.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > particularly find educational use cases of AI video are
| becoming compelling.
|
| compelling graphics take a long time to create. for
| education content creators, this can be too expensive as
| well. my high school physics teacher would hand draw
| figures on transparencies on an overhead projector. if he
| could have produced his drawings as animations cheap and
| fast using AI, it would have really brought his teaching
| style (he really tried to make it humorous) to another
| level. I think it would be effective for his audience.
|
| imagine the stylized animations for things like the
| rebooted Cosmos, NOVA, or even 3Blue1Brown on YT. there is
| potential for small teams to punch above their weight class
| with genAI graphics
| modeless wrote:
| You might have said the same thing about GPUs for 20 years when
| they were mostly for games, before they turned out to be
| essential for AI. All the entertainment use cases were directly
| funding development of the next generation of computing all
| along.
| tim333 wrote:
| Practical things are probably treating diseases and more
| abundance of physical goods. More speculative/sci-fi is merging
| in some form with AI and maybe immortality which I think is the
| more interesting bit.
| dwarfpagent wrote:
| I find it funny that the YouTube link takes you to the film, but
| like an hour into it.
| vmilner wrote:
| Yes, it made me think I'd already watched it and had forgotten
| about it...
| redbell wrote:
| 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.
| nightski wrote:
| In my experience all DeepMind content ends up being a puff piece
| for Dennis Hassabis. It's like his personal marketing engine lol.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Demis is after all a co-
| founder and CEO.
| Hacker_Yogi wrote:
| Makes it seem that AI is a one-man show while also feeding
| the hype cycle
| ainch wrote:
| Perhaps they need more advertising around the correct spelling
| of his name.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
| lysace wrote:
| It's official too. It's on:
| https://www.youtube.com/@googledeepmind
|
| Moderators: Please change the link; feels kind of unethical to
| bait someone into paying for this now.
| dwroberts wrote:
| I want to watch it, but at the same time, it's basically going to
| be an advert for Google. I'm not sure if I can put up with the
| uncritical fluff.
|
| I would love to see a real (ie outsider) filmmaker do this - eg
| an updated 'Lo and behold' by Werner Herzog
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Where he speaks french
| dist-epoch wrote:
| It's an advert for Demis Hassabis, not Google.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It was directed by Greg Kohs, who is a real filmmaker and does
| not work for Google.
| lysace wrote:
| Are you saying this movie production wasn't paid for by
| Google? If it was, surely he did?
| ilaksh wrote:
| oh it might have been paid for by Google for sure.
| lysace wrote:
| Like 99.99% probability, sure. Greg's previous big
| feature was on Deepmind's AlphaGo, three years after its
| Google acquisition.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6700846/
| gardnr wrote:
| Full length: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
|
| They do a great job capturing the "Move 37" moment:
| https://youtu.be/WXuK6gekU1Y?t=2993
| dwroberts wrote:
| Yeah I don't mean to say they're not a real filmmaker or
| untalented etc, I mean more the context they're doing it.
| That they've chosen to cover this topic themselves, and that
| they would show critical angles of it and not just promo +
| hagiography
| dwa3592 wrote:
| Loved this documentary. People complaining - WTFV first.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I caught it on the airplane a few days ago. I would have loved a
| little more technical depth, but I guess that's pretty much
| standard for a puff piece.
|
| It is interesting that Hassabis has had the same goal for almost
| 20 years now. He has a decent chance of hitting it too.
| someguy101010 wrote:
| reposting this from youtube comment
|
| From 1:14:55-1:15:20, within the span of 25 seconds, the way
| Demis spoke about releasing all known sequences without a shred
| of doubt was so amazing to see. There wasn't a single second
| where he worried about the business side of it (profits,
| earnings, shareholders, investors) --he just knew it had to be
| open source for the betterment of the world. Gave me goosebumps.
| I watched that on repeat for more than 10 times.
| dekhn wrote:
| Another way to interpret this (and I don't mean it pejoratively
| at all): Demis has been optimizing his chances for winning a
| nobel prize for quite some time now. Releasing the data
| increased that chance. He also would have been fairly certain
| that the commercial value of the predictions was fairly low
| (simply predicting structures accurately was never the rate-
| limiting step for downstream things like drug discovery). And
| that he and his team would have a commercial advantage by
| developing better proprietary models using them to make
| discoveries.
| tim333 wrote:
| Also since selling Deepmind to Google, it's Google's
| shareholder's money really.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I think that's a rather conspiratorial way of framing it.
|
| I think it's more about someone trying to do the most good
| that was possible at that time.
|
| I doubt he cares much about prizes or money at this point.
| dekhn wrote:
| It's hardly a conspiracy to use strategy and intelligence
| to maximize the probability of achieving the outcome you
| desire.
|
| He doesn't have to care much about prizes or money at this
| point: he won his prize and he gets all the hardware and
| talent he needs.
| potsandpans wrote:
| I also noticed this as well. Actually went back and watched it
| several times. It's an incredible moment. I keep thinking, "if
| this moment is real, this is truly a special person."
| mNovak wrote:
| My interpretation of that moment was that they had already
| decided to give away protein sequences as charity, it was just
| a decision of all as a bundle vs fielding individual requests
| (a 'service').
|
| Still great of them to do, and as can be seen it's worth it as
| a marketing move.
| dekhn wrote:
| (as an aside, this is a common thing that comes up when you
| have a good model: do you make a server that allows people to
| do one-off or small-scale predictions, or do you take a whole
| query set and run it in batch and save the results in a
| database; this comes up a lot)
| beginnings wrote:
| i tried to watch it but like AI in general, it was
| extraordinarily boring. neural nets are really cool technically,
| but the whole AI thing is just getting old and I couldnt care
| less where its going
|
| we can guarantee that whether its the birth of superintelligence
| or just a very powerful but fundamentally limited algorithm, it
| will not be used for the betterment of mankind, it will be
| exploited by the few at the top at the expense of the masses
|
| because thats apparently who we are as a species
| hbarka wrote:
| Hi, I'm genuinely curious about your writing style. I'm seeing
| this trend of no proper casing and no punctuation becoming
| vogue-ish. Is there a particular reason you prefer to write
| this way or is this writing style typical for a generation?
| Sincere question, not snark, coming from an older generation
| guy.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| If you grew up in the internet of early 2000s, that's how we
| wrote online.
| querez wrote:
| I grew up in the Internet at that time, and it's certainly
| not how I type. So you might want to be more specific about
| which sites or subcultures you think this style is
| representative of?
| luma wrote:
| I'm certainly no authority but i tend to write the same
| way for casual communication, came from the 90s era BBS
| days. It was (and still is) common on irc nets too.
| Autocorrect fixes up some of it, but sometimes i just
| have ideas i'm trying to dump out of my head and the
| shift key isn't helping that go faster. Emails at work
| get more attention, but bullshittin with friends on the
| PC? No need.
|
| I'll code switch depending on the venue, on HN i mostly
| Serious Post so my post history might demonstrate more
| care for the language than somewhere i consider more
| causal.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| This is the writing style of this generation. I've just
| scrolled 6 months of my conversation with a friend in his
| twenties. Not a single comma or period to be seen. I mean on
| his side.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Correct! I'm glad people are finally starting to get it
| verisimi wrote:
| weekends are always better on hn
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| How does that relate to my comment?
| quirino wrote:
| Watched it this week. Pretty good.
|
| There are a couple parts at the start and the end where a lady
| points her phone camera at stuff and asks an AI about what it
| sees. Must have been mind-blowing stuff when this section was
| recorded (2023), but now it's just the bare minimum people expect
| of their phones.
|
| Crazy times we're living in.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I was ok with that as "fledgling AI" at the start of the
| movie/documentary, but thought that going back to it and having
| the chatbot suggest a chess book opening to Hassabis at the end
| was cheesy and misleading.
|
| They should have ended the movie on the success of AlphaFold.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Greg Kohs and his team are brilliant. For example, the way it
| captured the emotional triumph of the AlphaFold achievement. And
| a lot of other things.
|
| One of the smart choices was that it omitted a whole potential
| discussion about LLMs (VLMs) etc. and the fact that that part of
| the AI revolution was not invented in that group, and just showed
| them using/testing it.
|
| One takeaway could be that you could be one of the world's most
| renowned AI geniuses and not invent the biggest breakthrough
| (like transformers). But also somewhat interesting is that even
| though he had been thinking about this for most of his life, the
| key technology (transformer-type architecture) was not invented
| until 2017. And they picked it up and adapted it within 3 years
| of it being invented.
|
| Also I am wondering if John Jumper and/or other members of the
| should get a little bit more credit for adapting transformers
| into Evoformer.
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