I agree about the effects of deep learning hype on deep learning funding, though I think very little of it has been AGI hype; people at the top level had been heavily conditioned to believe we were/are still in the AI winter of specialized ML algorithms to solve individual tasks. (The MIRI-sphere had to work very hard, before OpenAI and DeepMind started doing externally impressive things, to get serious discussion on within-lifetime timelines from anyone besides the Kurzweil camp.)
Maybe Demis was strategically overselling DeepMind, but I expect most people were genuinely over-optimistic (and funding-seeking) in the way everyone in ML always is.
I agree about the effects of deep learning hype on deep learning funding, though I think very little of it has been AGI hype; people at the top level had been heavily conditioned to believe we were/are still in the AI winter of specialized ML algorithms to solve individual tasks. (The MIRI-sphere had to work very hard, before OpenAI and DeepMind started doing externally impressive things, to get serious discussion on within-lifetime timelines from anyone besides the Kurzweil camp.)
Maybe Demis was strategically overselling DeepMind, but I expect most people were genuinely over-optimistic (and funding-seeking) in the way everyone in ML always is.