Final week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, mentioned out loud what many in Silicon Valley should have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Large Tech’s grip on AI.
New open-source massive language fashions—alternate options to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers and app builders can research, construct on, and modify—are dropping like sweet from a piñata. These are smaller, cheaper variations of the best-in-class AI fashions created by the massive corporations that (virtually) match them in efficiency—and so they’re shared totally free.
In some ways, that’s a very good factor. AI will not thrive if just some mega-rich corporations get to gatekeep this know-how or determine how it’s used. However this open-source growth is precarious, and if Large Tech decides to close up store, a boomtown may change into a backwater. Learn the complete story.
—Will Douglas Heaven
That wasn’t Google I/O — it was Google AI
All the things about life within the AI period is a bit complicated and bizarre. Nowhere has this been extra obvious than at Google I/O, the corporate’s annual convention showcasing what it’s been engaged on—and this yr’s present was all about AI.
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai stepped on stage earlier this week, he launched straight into the methods AI is in all the pieces the corporate does now, making it fairly clear that AI itself now’s the core product, or not less than, the spine of it.
Mat Honan, our editor in chief, went to look at the Large Google AI Present. Regardless of the impressive-looking demos, in the end he left with a deep sense of unease. Learn his story to seek out out why.
