A senior Google engineer said both OpenAI and his own company could lose the AI development race. May 4th.
Google, OpenAI Could Lose to Open Source
Google discussed its AI plans on its earnings call and publicly launched a chatbot called Bard. But the company has countless other AI studies underway in-house, and now one engineer suggests those efforts may fall short.
An anonymous Google engineer wrote:
“The uncomfortable truth is… we are not in a position to win this arms race, and neither is OpenAI. I did.”
That third faction, according to an anonymous engineer, is the open-source community, which is currently “wrapping” Google and open to anyone with a “rugged laptop.”
The engineer said the open source community is already solving problems that Google and other closed developers struggle with. He cites his LLaMA on Meta as the first “really capable foundation model” for the open source community. Despite its early stages, the community began refining his LLaMA within days of his March 3rd leak.
The engineer also commented on Google’s rivalry with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. He argued that OpenAI recruited researchers from his Google but faced the same challenges as Google and would eventually be “overshadowed” by open source.
Google must work with open source
The engineer suggested that competing directly with open source was a “losing proposition”, pointing out that users would not pay for a limited model if a free and unlimited model existed.
As such, he said Google should work with the open source community. He said Google is already doing this with other open-source products such as his Chrome web browser and his Android mobile operating system.
Google’s cloud division has also worked extensively with a number of open source blockchain projects, including Polygon, Solana, and Tezos.
A post about Google potentially losing the AI race first appeared on CryptoSlate, according to leaked documents.
