2024 was mostly a work year. I described work as “exhilarating and exhausting” a year ago, and those words remain a pretty good descriptions. While our group in GDM came together mid-2023 with the first merger of Google Brain and DeepMind, it felt like we started firing on all cylinders this year. We released continuously throughout 2024, but there were a couple of days where many strands of work came together. First was Google I/O in May, where we announced our video model Veo, plus a new (state-of-the-art) Imagen 3, and talked about Music AI Sandbox, a set of AI tools built with and for musicians. Then in December we followed up with Veo 2 (which we believe is the best video model out there) and made it available to a broader set of folks, plus an improved Imagen. I’ve seen some incredible works created using Veo, and I’m excited to see what gets made with it this year.

Between these we put image, video and music generation in the hands of YouTube users and Cloud customers, shipped a novel and quite fun live-music creation tool (MusicFX DJ), and more (notably, our researchers contributed the incredibly realistic dialogs which power the podcasts NotebookLM makes). And of course all this only happens thanks to teams of researchers coming together, gelling, and quietly making the advances which power all this - launches are often the end result of years of effort, and build on a ton of past work.

This was also the year I ended up managing full-time; I’d gathered a few reports by the end of 2023, but my team grew a little, and matured a lot (myself included) through 2024. I bumped up to Director and will spend the next year working out what that means.

Generative media is an interesting space: challenging from many different angles, often controversial, and with a ton of promise - watching film-makers pick up on Veo 2 has been particularly exciting over the last few months. I remain excited and grateful to be working here, on this, now. During the summer I bumped into an old friend, who knew me as a teenager and reminded me that I had been enthusiastic about AI way back then - nearly 40 years ago now - and going through some old papers, I found cuttings from the New Scientist sent to me by my uncle and aunt in 1992. New item by Tom Hume

Most things took a back seat to work this year. In particular Strava’s end-of-year report enthusiastically congratulated me on doing about 2/3 as much exercise in 2024 as in 2023. Karate in particular dropped off a lot, and I didn’t manage to make it back to Japan to retake my shodan - definitely one for 2025. Bright points here were a couple of courses in Petaluma with Rick Hotton, a really interesting teacher (and phenomenal example of body mechanics) who’s cross-trained in karate and aikido, and whose style of teaching reminds me fondly of Tom Helsby from Airenjuku Brighton. I also continue to find Saturday mornings, where I help teach the kid’s class at Zanshin dojo, extremely rewarding.

An old friend, someone I was once very close to, died suddenly and shockingly in April; an extremely sad story, the one bright point of which was reconnecting with a couple of faces from my early 20s.

Another old friend visited us early Summer; Pride and July 4th make fantastic book-ends for a trip to San Francisco.

We spent the rest of summer in Brighton (OK, Worthing) again, near to family and friends. A big group of family gathered in July for Dad’s 80th, which was lovely; and I traveled up to Warwickshire to see a beloved aunt, and thereon to Yorkshire for Mr Burt and another old friend, around beautiful Hebden Bridge.

Album of the year was The Head Hurts but the Heart Knows the Truth by Headache - reminsicent of Blue Jam, dream-like ambient background noise with a middle-aged British guy bemoaning his lost youth in a self-obsessed fashion. No sniggering at the back, please. Song of the year was Ministry by Karen O and Dangermouse.

I continued to shepherd the San Francisco Cognitive Science Reading Group, mostly monthly; we went bi-monthly towards the end of the year as work got busy, I hope to return to monthly in 2025. We read:

• “A Free Energy Principle for the Brain” by Karl Friston, a recurrent name in our various meetings who we finally started to grapple with. Introduces his ideas (tldr organisms act to minimize “surprise” between what they sense and what they expect by either updating their models of the world or acting on it to bring it in line with their expectations), but like every explanation I’ve read of them, gets technical quickly and is hard work in general.
• “A Brief History of Intelligence” by Max Bennett. By far the best book of the year, by virtue of being interesting in its narrative (tracking the places in evolution where pressures forced the development of specific cognitive capabilities) and by being incredibly well-written. Our group judged it the best book of the year; one member, who spent time at MIT CSAIL in the 70s, judged it the best book he had ever read. So thought-provoking we spent 4 sessions working through it. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
• “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought” (Ev Federenko et al.). Enjoyable, persuasive, felt like the settling of a long-running debate rather than introducing novel ideas - but that’s useful too.
• “Vehicles” by Valentino Braitenberg, a delightful book structured as a sequence of thought experiments around simple organisms which, as they get more complex through the book, exhibit more complex behaviours that suggest psychology.

I started 29 books, finished 22 of them, 3 are still in progress. The rest I gave up on, either consciously or otherwise. Outside those above, some highlights:

• Blindsight, by Peter Watts - excellent hard science fiction, intelligence without consciousness as a key character, horrifically unsentimental in parts with a large set of academic references at the back.
• Living on Earth, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Takes the perspective of the earth as a system, wuth intelligence as a cause of action rather than a goal in itself (a change of posture from his previous books). Lost me in the middle, but ends with some interesting meditations on the ethics of intervening in nature, and the observation that what distinguishes us from other hominids is our ability for tolerance of one another, perhaps not how it feels like from the news.
• Wicked and Weird by Buck 65, a hallucinatory biography from a man whose imagination is better than his memory. No idea how much is true but once I stopped worrying about that,
• Less is More by Jason Hickel. I went into this one, an argument for degrowth, sceptical - someone whose opinion I value had read it and was debating me while grounded in it, so I wanted to understand better. I found some superficial aspects easy to agree with (growth can’t go on forever, waste in the economy is bad, socialized healthcare is good) but came away unconvinced. I’ve been near enough consumer electronics to know that planned obsolence isn’t planned; he doesn’t acknowledge any environmental progress (London smog, the hole in the ozone layer); his passion for, and connection of everything with, animism just bewildered me. One part which did surprise me, and worried me, was his observation that growth in clean energy is being outpaced by overall energy usage. (I checked with OurWorldInData and yup, it is).
• Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. The pre-Trump JD Vance came across pretty well, I thought. It’s a well-told tale of growing up in poverty, the difficulties of getting out, how hard it is to climb into a new culture, how the lack of a family hurt him and his extended family helped.
• And Finally, by Henry Marsh, author of the incredible Do No Harm (tldr a neurosurgeon discusses his successes and failures). In this one, also autobiographical, Marsh transitions from doctor to patient as he’s diagnosed with cancer, calling into question his own bed-side manner with patients past. “Empathy, like exercise, is hard work and it is normal and natural to avoid it”