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Adept aims to build AI that can automate any software process – TechCrunch
In 2016 at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, several of the original developers behind what became Siri unveiled Viv, an AI platform that promised to connect various third-party applications to perform just about any task. The pitch was tantalizing but never fully realized. Samsung later acquired Viv, folding a pared-down version of the tech into its Bixby voice assistant.
Six years later, a new team claims to have cracked the code to a universal AI assistant or at least to have gotten a little bit closer. At a product lab called Adept that emerged from stealth today with $65 million in funding, they are in the founders words build[ing] general intelligence that enables humans and computers to work together creatively to solve problems.
Its lofty stuff. But Adepts co-founders, CEO David Luan, CTO Niki Parmar and chief scientist Ashish Vaswani, boil their ambition down to perfecting an overlay within computers that works using the same tools people do. This overlay will be able to respond to commands like generate a monthly compliance report or draw stairs between these two points in this blueprint, Adept asserts, all using existing software like Airtable, Photoshop, Tableau and Twilio to get the job done.
[W]ere training a neural network to use every software tool in the world, building on the vast amount of existing capabilities that people have already created. Luan told TechCrunch in an interview via email. [W]ith Adept, youll be able to focus on the work you most enjoy and ask our [system] to take on other tasks We expect the collaborator to be a good student and highly coachable, becoming more helpful and aligned with every human interaction.
From Luans description, what Adept is creating sounds a little like robotic process automation (RPA), or software robots that leverage a combination of automation, computer vision and machine learning to automate repetitive tasks like filing forms and responding to emails. But the team insists that their technology is far more sophisticated than what RPA vendors like Automation Anywhere and UiPath offer today.
Were building a general system that helps people get things done in front of their computer: a universal AI collaborator for every knowledge worker Were training a neural network to use every software tool in the world, building on the vast amount of existing capabilities that people have already created, Luan said. We think that AIs ability to read and write text will continue to be valuable, but that being able to do things on a computer will be significantly more valuable for enterprise [M]odels trained on text can write great prose, but they cant take actions in the digital world. You cant ask [them] to book you a flight, cut a check to a vendor or conduct a scientific experiment. True general intelligence requires models that can not only read and write, but act when people ask it to do something.
Adept isnt the only one exploring this idea. In a February paper, scientists at Alphabet-backed DeepMind describe what they call a data-driven approach for teaching AI to control computers. By having an AI observe keyboard and mouse commands from people completing instruction-following computer tasks, like booking a flight, the scientists were able to show the system how to perform over a hundred tasks with human-level accuracy.
Not-so-coincidentally, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman recently teamed up with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman to launch Inflection AI, which like Adept aims to use AI to help humans work more efficiently with computers.
Adepts ostensible differentiator is a brain trust of AI researchers hailing from DeepMind, Google and OpenAI. Vaswani and Parmar helped to pioneer the Transformer, an AI architecture that has gained considerable attention within the last several years. Dating back to 2017, Transformer has become the architecture of choice for natural language tasks, demonstrating an aptitude for summarizing documents, translating between languages and even classifying images and analyzing biological sequences.
Among other products, OpenAIs language-generating GPT-3 was developing using Transformer technology.
Over the next few years, everyone just piled onto the Transformer, using it to solve many decades-old problems in rapid succession. When I led engineering at OpenAI, we scaled up the Transformer into GPT-2 (GPT-3s predecessor) and GPT-3, Luan said. Googles efforts scaling Transformer models yielded [the AI architecture] BERT, powering Google search. And several teams, including our founding team members, trained Transformers that can write code. DeepMind even showed that the Transformer works for protein folding (AlphaFold) and Starcraft (AlphaStar). Transformers made general intelligence tangible for our field.
At Google, Luan was the overall tech lead for what he describes as the large models effort at Google Brain, one of tech giants preeminent research divisions. There, he trained bigger and bigger Transformers with the goal of eventually building one general model to power all machine learning use cases, but his team ran into a clear limitation. The best results were limited to models engineered to excel in specific domains, like analyzing medical records or responding to questions about particular topics.
Since the beginning of the field, weve wanted to build models with similar flexibility as human intelligence-ones that can work for a diverse variety of tasks [M]achine learning has seen more progress in the last five years than in the prior 60, Luan said. Historically, long-term AI work has been the purview of large tech companies, and their concentration of talent and compute has been unimpeachable. Looking ahead, we believe that the next era of AI breakthroughs will require solving problems at the heart of human-computer collaboration.
Whatever form its product and business model ultimately takes, can Adept succeed where others failed? If it can, the windfall could be substantial. According to Markets and Markets, the market for business process automation technologies technologies that streamline enterprise customer-facing and back-office workloads will grow from $9.8 billion in 2020 to $19.6 billion by 2026. One 2020 survey by process automation vendor Camunda (a biased source, granted) found that 84% of organizations are anticipating increased investment in process automation as a result of industry pressures, including the rise of remote work.
Adepts technology sounds plausible in theory, [but] talking about Transformers needing to be able to act feels a bit like misdirection to me, Mike Cook, an AI researcher at the Knives & Paintbrushes research collective, which is unaffiliated with Adept, told TechCrunch via email. Transformers are designed to predict the next items in a sequence of things, thats all. To a Transformer, it doesnt make any difference whether that prediction is a letter in some text, a pixel in an image, or an API call in a bit of code. So this innovation doesnt feel any more likely to lead to artificial general intelligence than anything else, but it might produce an AI that is better suited to assisting in simple tasks.
Its true that the cost of training cutting-edge AI systems is lower than it once was. With a fraction of OpenAIs funding, recent startups including AI21 Labs and Cohere have managed to build models comparable to GPT-3 in terms of their capabilities.
Continued innovations in multimodal AI, meanwhile AI that can understand the relationships between images, text and more put a system that can translate requests into a wide range of computer commands within the realm of possibility. So does work like OpenAIs InstructGPT, a technique that improves the ability of language models like GPT-3 to follow instructions.
Cooks main concern is how Adept trained its AI systems. He notes that one of the reasons other Transformer models have had such success with text is that theres an abundance of examples of text to learn from. A product like Adepts would presumably need a lot of examples of successfully completed tasks in applications (e.g. Photoshop) paired with text descriptions, but this data doesnt occur that naturally in the world.
In the February DeepMind study, the scientists wrote that, in order to collect training data for their system, they had to pay 77 people to complete over 2.4 million demonstrations of computer tasks.
[T]he training data is probably created artificially, which raises a lot of questions both about who was paid to create it, how scalable this is to other areas in the future, and whether the trained system will have the kind of depth that other Transformer models have, Cook said. Its [also] not a path to general intelligence by any means It might make it more capable in some areas, but its probably going to be less capable than a system trained explicitly on a particular task and application.
Even the best-laid roadmaps can run into unforeseen technical challenges, especially where it concerns AI. But Luan is placing his faith in Adepts founding senior talent, which includes the former lead for Googles model production infrastructure (Kelsey Schroeder) and one of the original engineers on Googles production speech recognition model (Anmol Gulati).
[W]hile general intelligence is often described in the context of human replacement, thats not our north star. Instead, we believe that AI systems should be built with people at the center, Luan said. We want to give everyone access to increasingly sophisticated AI tools that help empower them to achieve their goals collaboratively with the tool; our models are designed to work hand-in-hand with people. Our vision is one where people remain in the drivers seat: discovering new solutions, enabling more informed decisions, and giving us more time for the work that we actually want to do.
Greylock and Addition co-led Adepts funding round. The round also saw participation from Root Ventures and angels including Behance founder Scott Belsky (founder of Behance), Airtable founder Howie Liu, Chris Re, Tesla Autopilot lead Andrej Karpathy and Sarah Meyohas.
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Adept aims to build AI that can automate any software process - TechCrunch
Artificial intelligence Might Soon Tell you How Adam and Eve Lived – Analytics Insight
Researchers are using technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning to get more accurate results.
Uncovering evidence for historical theories and identifying patterns in past events has long been hindered by the labor-intensive process of inputting data from artifacts and handwritten records. Normally, epigraphers scholars who study ancient texts written on durable materials such as stone, metal, or pottery use their knowledge of repositories of information and digital databases to perform string matching searches to find textual and contextual parallels. However, differences in the digital-search query that can exclude or conceal relevant results and that the texts often are discovered not in their original context can complicate the work. Starting from Adam and Eve to the Greek gods there is so much to discover and researchers are using advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning to get more accurate results. Most scientific research to date has focused on whether Adam and Eve could have passed on genetic material to everyone living; however, this doesnt seem to be the type of ancestry the Bible is concerned with. While all genetic ancestors are genealogical ancestors, the inverse is not necessarily true.
So, what does this mean for Adam and Eve? Well, in 2004, a computer simulation of life on Earth was created to test and see when the most recent common ancestor for all humans was. The researchers put higher barriers than historically existed to stack the odds against there being a common ancestor in the recent past. Despite this, the results, published in Nature, found common ancestors only two or three thousand years ago. Apart from Adam and Eve, the adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques is speeding up such research and drawing attention to overlooked information. But this approach, known as digital humanities, is in a battle for funding against more future-focused applications of AI.
Restoring or recreating archaeological artifacts is a complicated problem for computer vision models. Previous work algorithms learning to reassemble photos or documents, for example has not accounted for the degradation of fragments, unclear images, or imprecise piece-fitting.
Ancient texts written on stone tablets, such as those found in Greece, provide invaluable insight into the history of past civilizations. However, being as much as 2,600 years old, these priceless inscriptions havent been immune to the ravages of time. Theyre often damaged and littered with chips and cracks, sometimes even missing entire fragments of text. To fill these gaps and reconstruct the missing sections, historians typically rely on a discipline called epigraphy, which uses grammatical and linguistic considerations, layout and shape, textual parallels, and historical context to estimate what the text originally contained. As this is a very complex and time-consuming process, the team behind Googles DeepMind AI joined forces with the University of Oxford to develop Pythia, the first ancient text restoration model that uses deep neural networks to recover missing characters from damaged text.
Artificial intelligence technology has had a profound impact on a wide variety of industries in recent years, transforming almost every aspect of our lives in the process. While most of the talk surrounding AI has focused on how it will affect the human workforce, it cant be denied that its found some very promising applications in certain areas. One of these areas is archaeology, where AIs ability to analyze large amounts of data in a short amount of time and uncover hidden patterns is very useful. Whether its used to restore ancient Greek texts, translate long-lost languages, reassemble damaged archaeological artifacts, or uncover hidden designs in the Nazca Lines, AI is becoming an increasingly important tool in archaeologists arsenal, helping them bring history back to life.
In conclusion, looking at the continued developments there is no lie that in no time artificial intelligence will be able to tell how Adam and Eve used to live in the past. Also, we will get the answers to many unsolved mysteries.
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Artificial intelligence Might Soon Tell you How Adam and Eve Lived - Analytics Insight
Why every veteran should try deep-sea fishing at least once – We Are The Mighty
Many soldiers deployed for missions in violent combat zones end up with mental health issues, mainly PTSD. Given the numerous encounters with death and losing friends during field operations, this is expected. Naturally, humans deal with such occurrences differently, but sometimes the brain finds it hard to cope. For such reasons, veterans are always encouraged to enroll in activities that keep them active, blocking the memories of the tough days. Several programs have been created to help veterans cope with life after active duty.
Besides providing a wide variety of fish types, deep-sea fishing is a lifesaver for troubled veterans. According to Captain Jimmy Armel, an Army Ranger, fishing is more than a hobby. After returning home from deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Captain Jimmy struggled to adjust to civilian life. During his active duty days, he suffered concussions and other injuries.
Jimmy shares that he was depressed and frequently resorted to alcoholic beverages to relieve his stress. He even considered suicide at one point, which many veterans with PTSD have considered. He figured he had to find a better way of coping with his PTSD since alcoholism only made it worse. Jimmy took advantage of a newly discoveredpassion by establishing a fishing charter on Tybee Island, which he used to allow veteransto recover.
Many times, people who visit counselors or therapists perceive themselves as weak, something we should change. Until recently, mental health was not prioritized in many countries. The stigma around counseling should end as it has resulted in many suicides, some of which may have been prevented if the deceased had visited a counselor or therapist. This stigma is especially pronounced in the gun fighting world, as these people are expected to be tough. As such, veterans shy from seeking help when dealing with PTSD because they dont want to seem fragile.
According to experts, such veterans can benefit from deep-sea fishing, as it works well as a form of counseling. Those enrolled in deep-sea fishing programs often report a feeling of mental calmness after returning from the sea. Talking to other people while catching fish is therapeutic, especially if the people involved are also veterans. Sharing your experiences and seeing that you are not the only one suffering from loneliness, anxiety or PTSD will help with recovery. Even if you dont catch any fish, deep-sea fishing has a way of clearing the evil thoughts off your mind.
Keeping yourself busy is one of the best ways to deal with PTSD, as loneliness and idleness kill the mind the most. According to veterans who have participated in deep-sea fishing, the activity gives them something to worry about. At that moment, the veteran controls the situation and does not have to worry about the unknown constantly.Sometimes, the veterans will engage in healthy fishing competitions, a sport that is proven to relieve stress. While most veterans rarely share their anxiety issues with people they are close with, telling a stranger your deepest worries is easier. You will find yourself opening up and even getting emotional, a major step in recovery. Furthermore, no one will judge you for being weak because almost everyone participating in veteran-focused deep-sea fishing has a similar issue. Keeping your mental health in check is as vital as your bodys health. Veterans with or without PTSD should try deep-sea fishing to reap its benefits.
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Why every veteran should try deep-sea fishing at least once - We Are The Mighty
COLUMN | Stalin brings to mind memories of the Cold War – Manhattan Mercury
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COLUMN | Stalin brings to mind memories of the Cold War - Manhattan Mercury
Katie Paterson: The mind-bending art of deep time | TED Talk
Ocean Vuong | Penguin Books, 2021 | Book
Ocean Vuong writes with a radiance unlike any author I know of. Transforming a "hurricane of feeling" into images of pure, startling beauty, he proves language can penetrate deeper than human touch.
Roman Krznaric | The Experiment, 2020 | Book
Expanding our time horizons to envisage a longer now is the most imperative journey any of us can make. Roman Krznaric's inspirational book traces out these steps for us. Stacks of books on my shelves mourn the impending loss of the living world. The Good Ancestor emerges as deeply necessary, and hopeful, providing keys to create profound and lasting change. Join the time rebellion, and help shape the lives of those to come.
Andri Snr Magnason | Open Letter, 2021 | Book
I can't stop thinking about On Time and Water. In this story about glaciers, grandmothers and holy cows, Andri Snaer Magnason conveys what human-induced climate change means for us all. Blending science, mythology, poetry and personal history, he faces the major challenge of this century which affects "everything and everyone we know and love." Inspirational, hopeful and totally vital.
Robin Wall Kimmerer | Milkweed Editions, 2015 | Book
Robin Wall Kimmerer says, "People can't understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it's a gift." With magic and musicality, Braiding Sweetgrass does just that, teaching the deep value of our reciprocity with nature. It is a reminder to live in harmony with future generations, and it is a nourishing and joyous read.
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Katie Paterson: The mind-bending art of deep time | TED Talk
21 Deep Questions to Ask to Get to Know … – Learning Mind
How do you get to know someones true personality? It would seem weird to ask a relative stranger about their values and beliefs.
Luckily, the following questions are good conversation starters that reveal more than you might think. Read on to find some great deep questions to ask someone to get to know them better.
When thinking of deep questions to ask people to get a conversation started, it can be wise to pick ones that cant be answered with a yes or no. Those types of questions lead to stilted conversations and awkward pauses.
Instead, pick an interesting subject that will help the other person open up a bit about themselves and their views.
Asking the right questions can stimulate more meaningful and interesting conversations. They can lead to the discovery of common interests and mutual understanding.
It is as well to be cautious about how you ask someone questions. You dont want them to feel they are being grilled or that you are asking questions that are too revealing. Bear these points in mind and choose questions that gradually help you to get to know the other person.
The most important factor in getting to know someone is actually as much to do with how you listen than what questions you ask them. Give your attention fully to what they say so that you can respond appropriately and begin to develop a deeper bond.
Dont forget to share something about yourself too. If you force the other person into doing all the talking, they can begin to feel pressured. This can make them feel vulnerable and as if the relationship is one-sided. Sharing something personal, but not too personal, about yourself can help to build trust.
These questions are light-hearted and will not seem too weird to a potential new acquaintance. However, they can actually reveal a lot about what the other person enjoys, cares for and dreams of.
Once you know someone a bit better, you might like to ask some deeper questions. These questions reveal more about a persons background and fundamental beliefs and values as well as their accomplishments and what drives them in life.
The last questions are some of the deepest and should be saved for when you know someone reasonably well. Some of them ask the other person to reveal very personal details and become quite vulnerable.
So make sure they are comfortable with the questions and dont push too hard if they dont want to answer. If they seem uneasy, switch back to some more light-hearted questions for now.
These questions are all great conversation starters, but they often reveal more than you think about a persons values in life. They seem quite casual but can tell us a lot about another persons personality, desires and values.
Of course, you must consider the situation and the other persons reaction. Some people do not like to give away too much information about themselves too quickly.
Allow the person to feel comfortable in what they reveal about themselves and dial it back if you suspect they are uneasy.
At the end of the day, there is no point in rushing into a relationship with someone. Asking these questions can help you get started, but remember that the best friendships and relationships take time and commitment to develop.
Contributing writer at Learning Mind
Kirstie Pursey holds a diploma in creative writing from the Open University and works as a writer, blogger, and storyteller. She lives in London with her family of people, dogs, and cats. She is a lover of reading, writing, being in nature, fairy lights, candles, fireside, and afternoon tea.
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21 Deep Questions to Ask to Get to Know ... - Learning Mind
35 Deep Unanswerable Questions That Will Blow Your Mind
Have you ever been asked a question that you think has no meaning and as a result, you were unable to think about an answer for it? Most times it might not be a mistake, as there exist some questions which in reality dont have answers to them, or that the individual who asked the question might be up to some prank. No matter what the case might be, Here are some examples of those kinds of questions.
As humans, we live our lives every day questioning many unanswerable questions like the very essence of the existence of life, the limitations nature has placed in us, why it is so and our resolve to conquer it. At any point in time when we are unable to give sufficient and satisfactory answers to these questions, they can be termed unanswerable at that particular time.
Thus, not all questions will have answers to them at the particular point when they were asked. If that is the case, a question can be deemed as unanswerable.
What qualifies a question or an interrogative sentence/expression to be understood and responded to as a question is obviously the possibility of having an answer. Whether it be a general knowledge question whose answer can be given without deep thought or a more complex philosophical question that demands deep reflection before giving an answer, the bottom line is the existence of an answer to the question posed. But when theres no known answer to such a question, does it still qualify to be considered a question?
Thus, for a question to be answerable, there must be an existing answer either for it either already known or yet to be known. In any case, where there is no known answer to a question or where all attempts to answer a question intelligently is not satisfactory, such a question can be deemed unanswerable.
No matter how unanswerable a question might be, you can still make a good attempt at showing how knowledgeable you are in the subject matter by doing any of these cleverly thought out things:
Whenever you are asked a seemingly difficult question, you can buy sometime before you provide an answer by asking that the question be repeated. Obviously, you heard the question clearly the first time and your brain has already started processing what you likely think is an answer to the question.
In addition, the question will most likely be asked a second time with more clarity making it easier for you to attempt giving an answer to it.
When you are still not sure you got all that is required of you to explain, you can simply ask for a calrification in a polite way. This can be Please would you mind repeating the question? I want to make sure I got all of it.
This works best for multifaceted complex questions. Break down the different components of the question and start answering them from the least known to the unknown.
By starting with what you already know about the question, show how knowledgeable you are on the subject matter by dishing out what you already know. Build a bridge between this and the other aspect of the question which you dont know and of course you can admit at this point that you dont know that other aspect of the question.
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35 Deep Unanswerable Questions That Will Blow Your Mind
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6 ways to use your mind to control pain – Harvard Health
Meditation with guided imagery, which often involves imagining yourself in a restful environment, may reduce your need for pain medication.
Drugs are very good at getting rid of pain, but they often have unpleasant, and even serious, side effects when used for a long time. If you have backache, fibromyalgia, arthritis, or other chronic pain that interferes with your daily life, you may be looking for a way to relieve discomfort that doesn't involve drugs. Some age-old techniquesincluding meditation and yogaas well as newer variations may help reduce your need for pain medication.
Research suggests that because pain involves both the mind and the body, mind-body therapies may have the capacity to alleviate pain by changing the way you perceive it. How you feel pain is influenced by your genetic makeup, emotions, personality, and lifestyle. It's also influenced by past experience. If you've been in pain for a while, your brain may have rewired itself to perceive pain signals even after the signals aren't being sent anymore.
The Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital specializes in helping people learn techniques to alleviate stress, anxiety, and pain. Dr. Ellen Slawsby, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who works with patients at the Benson-Henry Institute, suggests learning several techniques so that you can settle on the ones that work best for you. "I tend to think of these techniques as similar to flavors in an ice cream store. Depending on your mood,you might want a different flavor of ice creamor a different technique," Dr. Slawsby says. "Practicing a combination of mind-body skills increases the effectiveness of pain relief."
The following techniques can help you take your mind off the pain and may help to override established pain signals.
1. Deep breathing. It's central to all the techniques, so deep breathing is the one to learn first. Inhale deeply, hold for a few seconds, and exhale. To help you focus, you can use a word or phrase to guide you. For example, you may want to breathe in "peace" and breathe out "tension." There are also several apps for smartphones and tablets that use sound and images to help you maintain breathing rhythms.
2. Eliciting the relaxation response. An antidote to the stress response, which pumps up heart rate and puts the body's systems on high alert, the relaxation response turns down your body's reactions. After closing your eyes and relaxing all your muscles, concentrate on deep breathing. When thoughts break through, say "refresh," and return to the breathing repetition. Continue doing this for 10 to 20 minutes. Afterward, sit quietly for a minute or two while your thoughts return. Then open your eyes and sit quietly for another minute.
3. Meditation with guided imagery. Begin deep breathing, paying attention to each breath. Then listen to calming music or imagine being in a restful environment. If you find your mind wandering, say "refresh," and call the image back into focus.
4. Mindfulness. Pick any activity you enjoyreading poetry, walking in nature, gardening, or cookingand become fully immersed in it. Notice every detail of what you are doing and how your senses and emotions are responding. Practice bringing mindfulness to all aspects of your life.
5. Yoga and tai chi. These mind-body exercises incorporate breath control, meditation, and movements to stretch and strengthen muscles. Videos and apps can help you get started. If you enroll in a yoga or tai chi class at a gym or health club, your health insurance may subsidize the cost.
6. Positive thinking. "When we're ill, we often tend to become fixated on what we aren't able to do. Retraining your focus on what you can do instead of what you can't will give you a more accurate view of yourself and the world at large," says Dr. Slawsby. She advises keeping a journal in which you list all the things you are thankful for each day. "We may have limitations, but that doesn't mean we aren't still whole human beings."
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6 ways to use your mind to control pain - Harvard Health
Whistleblower says DeepMind waited months to fire a researcher accused of sexual misconduct – The Verge
A former employee at DeepMind, the Google-owned AI research lab, accuses the companys human resources department of intentionally delaying its response to her complaints about sexual misconduct in the workplace, as first reported by the Financial Times.
In an open letter posted to Medium, the former employee (who goes by Julia to protect her identity) says she was sexually harassed by a senior researcher for months while working at the London-based company. During this time, she was allegedly subject to numerous sexual propositions and inappropriate messages, including some that described past sexual violence against women and threats of self-harm.
Julia got in contact with the companys HR and grievance team as early as August 2019 to outline her interactions with the senior researcher, and she raised a formal complaint in December 2019. The researcher in question reportedly wasnt dismissed until October 2020. He faced no suspension and was even given a company award while HR was processing Julias complaint, leaving Julia fearing for her and her other female colleagues safety.
Although the Financial Times report says her case wasnt fully resolved until seven months after she first reported the misconduct, Julia told The Verge that the whole process actually took 10 months. She claims DeepMinds communications team used semantics to push back on the Financial Times story and shorten the amount of time it took to address her case.
It was in fact 10 months, they [DeepMind] argued it was only 7 because thats when the appeal finished, though the disciplinary hearing took another 2 months, and involved more rounds of interviews for me, Julia said. My point stands: whether it was 10 months or 7, it was far, far too long.
Besides believing her case was intentionally dragged out, Julia also claims two separate HR managers told her she would face disciplinary action if she spoke out about it. Her manager allegedly required her to attend meetings with the senior researcher as well, despite being partially aware of her report, the Financial Times says. While Julia herself didnt sign a non-disclosure agreement, many other DeepMind employees have.
In a separate post on Medium, Julia and others offered several suggestions as to how Alphabet (Google and DeepMinds parent company) can improve its response to complaints and reported issues, such as doing away with the NDA policy for victims and setting a strict two-month time limit for HR to resolve grievances.
The Alphabet Workers Union also expressed support for Julia in a tweet, noting: The NDAs we sign should never be used to silence victims of harassment or workplace abuse. Alphabet should have a global policy against this.
In a statement to The Verge, DeepMind interim head of communications Laura Anderson acknowledged the struggles Julia went through but avoided taking accountability for her experiences. DeepMind takes all allegations of workplace misconduct extremely seriously and we place our employees safety at the core of any actions we take, Anderson said. The allegations were investigated thoroughly, and the individual who was investigated for misconduct was dismissed without any severance payments... Were sorry that our former employee experienced what they did and we recognise that they found the process difficult.
DeepMind has faced concerns over its treatment of employees in the past. In 2019, a Bloomberg report said DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, also known as Moose, was placed on administrative leave for the controversy surrounding some of his projects. Suleyman left the company later that year to join Google. In 2021, a Wall Street Journal report revealed that Suleyman was deprived of management duties in 2019 for allegedly bullying staff members. Google also launched an investigation into his behavior at the time, but it never made its findings public.
If anyone finds themselves in a similar situation: first, right now, before anything bad happens, join a union, Julia said in response to the broader concerns. Then if something bad happens: Document everything. Know your rights. Dont let them drag it out. Stay vocal. These stories are real, they are happening to your colleagues.
Correction April 5th 6:51PM ET: A previous version of the story stated Julia signed an NDA. She did not, but other DeepMind employees have. We regret the error.
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Whistleblower says DeepMind waited months to fire a researcher accused of sexual misconduct - The Verge