https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/10/23790132/google-memo-moat-ai-leak-demis-hassabis
In this link this discussion:
The memo, which was obtained by SemiAnalysis from a public Discord server, says that neither Google nor OpenAI have what they need to succeed in the AI industry. Instead, the researcher claims “a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch”: open-source AI models that the researcher says are “faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable.”
WHO IS THE THIRD FACTION?
Go a level deeper, beyond this news about news, and read the moat memo.
The third faction is the open source community.
The memo has an entire timeline section, dedicated to showing the speed at which the open source community absorbed and iterated on the leaked facebook model, LaMMa.
The memo puts a lot of emphasis on how google and co are building new models from scratch, over months, with millions of dollars - and yet open source is building patches, in days, with only a few hundred dollars - and the patches stack, and are easily shareable.
The open source models, through these patches, are getting better faster than google can re-architect and re-train new models from scratch.
The main point of the memo is that google needs to change their strategy, if they want to stay “ahead” (some would argue they’re already behind) of the competition.
huggingface is full of models not created by a large corporation. Maybe they mean those?
Can I, as a dumb end-user, use models from there?
Yes! …well, with a caveat.
Huggingface models (even the ones published to the platform by Google or fb) are available for anyone to use, but they’re not quite intended to be chatbots; they’re more like pretrained machine learning models for data science pipelines.
Still, if you know python or are willing to learn, you can use huggingface however you want. You’re totally allowed to download a model, open it in python, and ask questions to it. Or feed it a long text and ask for summaries etc.
Yeah no I guess I’m more looking for the open-source end-products I could use similarly to chatGPT or midjourney etc. I did learn a bit of python a while back but I’m no coder.
Instead, the researcher claims “a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch”: open-source AI models that the researcher says are “faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable.”
The sentence you quote says who the 3rd faction is: Open-source AI models.
A wild guess, but could it be Microsoft?
I mean they are already creating use cases and integrating them in their apps, especially their business suite.
While Google and OpenAI are ahead in AI innovation, I feel Microsoft is getting ahead in implementation and actual end user scenarios.
Microsoft office offerings are still much larger than Google’s, plus they capture Dev’s needs with GitHub CoPilot and VS/ VSCode integrations.
I feel like by the time Google will be ready or OpenAI’s contract with MS ends, both of these companies will lag sufficiently behind MS in real world.