Senior Engineer Predicts Google’s Downfall
Is Alphabet’s Google still sitting in the driver’s seat in the AI arms race? This question has been plaguing experts and investors ever since ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, a “capped-profit” company whose biggest shareholder is Microsoft, took the world by storm last November.
This next-generation chatbot responds to the most complex requests with human-like replies. It has changed the way internet search Google’s core business is perceived. The chatbot showed that artificial intelligence had reached a point where technology can perform certain tasks much better than humans.
Microsoft (MSFT) immediately incorporated ChatGPT features into Bing, its search engine. The Redmond, Wash., group has also deployed these features in almost all of its products and its cloud activity.
Faced with this push, Google (GOOGL) recently launched Bard, a rival to ChatGPT. But despite this move, doubts persist about Google’s leadership in a sector where the internet giant was one of the pioneers. These doubts are also expressed within the group based in Mountain View, Calif. Luke Sernau, an engineer of the group, shared some of these doubts in a message, which has been circulating internally since April, and which was published by semianalysis.com.
Sernau laments that Google is primarily focused on its rivalry with OpenAI. This rivalry is negative, it seems because it blinds the internet giant, which allows a more dangerous adversary to advance under the radar. This silent adversary is the open-source community. This community includes many researchers who do not work for tech groups. They make faster discoveries and advances in AI than Google and OpenAI, says Sernau.
Open source communities are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 at a record speed, he explained. They can finetune a personalized AI on your laptop in an evening and entire websites are full of art models with no restrictions whatsoever, and text is not far behind.
