Must feel pretty bad being a rank and file dev at DeepMind and realizing that your leads had all the talent and funding in the world that they could have used for building language model products and instead they heavily invested in solving board games.
Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.
The human in the loop reinforcement learning paper that powered chatgpt's training arose from deepmind's experiments with boardgames (and games). AGI is still an unsolved problem and deep RL that arose from the success of deepmind's experiments wth boardgames and games so far, will likely play a huge part in it
Search? Gmail completing your emails? They have lots of AI products, they just wait until they are more solid before releasing stuff. Now they will rush out a competitor to ChatGPT before it is ready, but they would use it for something given time.
Board games have been used in AI since the beginning. They provide a good environment as we know the rules and control them. Also as everybody uses them it is easier to compare different algorithms. Most advances in AI were done in board games. Most probably chatGPT uses lot of those things you think are irrelevant in board games (reinforcement learning for fine tuning the responses with human feedback, same algorithms used in board games).
Deepmind did not pioneer reinforcement learning. In fact it wasn’t even the first place to use neural networks for feature representation in RL. That was achieved with Backgammon in the 90s.
They also do work with the UK National Health Service.
I have heard (high level sources, unconfirmed publicly) the YouTube algorithm that promotes open mouth creator with $$$$ signs thumbnails is based on their ground breaking research from this collaboration.
Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.