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šŸ”„ If you read one thing about AI this week, let it be Google’s leaked doc

ā€œWe have no moat, and neither does OpenAIā€
Full article here: www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

Some quotes 🧵
Open-source is innovating faster and cheaper than us, or OpenAI, ever can.

Examples:
Large expensive models are still slightly better, but the gap is quickly closing.
Meta’s LLaMA leaked, and the open-source community tan with it.
Some innovations are now coming from single people, tinkering on their laptop ā€œin their garageā€
After StableDiffusion it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. (Anyone remember DALL-E? many people sure don’t..)
Seems like having a lot of money to train large models might cause them to pay less attention to far cheaper methods (inversely, that’s what the tinkerer at home works with)
And maybe those small, cheap, incremental updates can outrun progress on large, expensive models.
To save money, ā€œtinkerersā€ are training on smaller, but better curated data-sets. Outputs from ChatGPT that have been shared by users because they were cool are used.
Highly specialized individuals are making highly specialized products.
And Meta might be benefiting here… because the leaked model was theirs, they can now use all the innovation that’s happening on top of it 🄲
Is Google about to open-source a lot more stuff? ā€œIf you can’t beat ā€˜m, join ā€˜mā€?
And why be secretive? ā€œOpenAI already knows everything we do because they hire our people.ā€
Additional thoughts after 24h:

1. We don’t know if the doc is real, but I haven’t heard anyone argue with the analysis + we know that there are sometimes well written white-papers circulating within Google.

2. It does conveniently signal to the regulator ā€œwe are not a monopolyā€
3. Talking about regulations: open-source is definitely harder to regulate.

4. Apple and Amazon have been relatively absent in the recent AI race — There have been rumors that Apple has vastly underestimated LLMs potential. Might they now benefit from open-source?
At Cradle.bio we are using AI to design better proteins to ultimately replace traditional farms šŸ„ and factories šŸ­

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