Update: this article got published by Quillette! Below is a short preview:
In March 2016, the world was about to watch a paradigm shift. Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo team challenged Lee Sedol, the world champion of Go, to a competition. Go is the oldest and most complex strategy game ever created, played continuously for over 2,500 years. It has more possible board positions than there are atoms in the universe, and it was considered the exclusive province of the human mind. Researchers guessed that AI was at least a decade away from competing at the top level.
Sedol predicted that he would win in a landslide. He lost the first game. In the second game, on move 37, AlphaGo made a move that made no sense to anyone watching. Sedol got up and left the room for fifteen minutes. Commentators thought it was a mistake, a clear vindication of human superiority. But it wasn’t a mistake. The AI was playing in a part of the game that the human mind had never explored. This seminal moment showed us that, after 2,500 years, people have still not fully understood the game they invented. We have been playing in a corner of the probability space, and mistaking it for the whole map.
Sedol retired from professional Go three years later. In a reflection published this year, he called the match “a guide that presented the future in advance” and said it “sent a clear signal to humanity about how the world would change.” A year later, AlphaGo Zero—which was not trained on human games, just on the rules for three days—defeated the earlier AlphaGo 100:0.
I think about Move 37 a lot. I think about what it means when the map you thought was complete turns out to be almost empty.
Before Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, information about the model had already leaked online, so it didn’t come as a complete surprise. The model is so good at finding security exploits that they won’t be releasing it publicly […]
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My way of helping us imagine this future is through a movie about two kids who weaponize identity and narrative to destroy each other. I first started thinking about this project in 2016, the year of AlphaGo and prominent state-sponsored disinformation. Seven solid years of work and over 400 VFX shots later, we are bringing this film and its conversation to the world, along with an interactive fictional disinformation campaign.
Our premiere is May 16 in San Francisco. If you want to talk about these issues with us, come on by.
