Friday time. Let’s talk work. | While Google and OpenAI are going toe-to-toe to dominate the AI market, open source projects are sprinting past the two of them at incredible - and perhaps lethal - speed. | The leaked document titled “We have no moat,” which was verified to be real by a handful of trusted sources, supposedly came from an insider within Google raising a cautionary alarm about the sorry state of Google’s own AI development efforts in relation to open source projects. | “Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable.” |
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| Most people think the recent explosion of AI was due to OpenAI and OpenAI alone, but the reality is open source models have also enjoyed a Cambrian explosion in the same timeframe. The tools required simply aren’t secluded to giant private companies any longer. | Furthermore, plenty of the best minds simply want to work open source. Economic incentives can make this hard, but the value of what’s at stake is so leviathan that even just making a meaningful contribution to a major open source project could radically improve one’s station in life in many different ways. | “The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop.” |
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| There is no better time to be that one person with a laptop building the future. In a matter of weeks since Meta’s LLaMA was leaked, contributors had it running on a Raspberry Pi, albeit slowly. | “They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B.” “Who would pay for a Google product with usage restrictions if there is a free, high quality alternative without them?” |
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| This reality could put Google in a dangerous position inside of a couple years, if not a few months. Google’s core value proposition is billions of people searching for information and advertisers paying to be at the top of those searches. That’s it. But what if people start to trust a faster, more accurate source of information that also includes sharp, instant summarization and synthesis? Game over, Google. | It’s not just Google that’s in trouble here. OpenAI, the darling of the AI gold rush, has already been usurped in image generation as Stable Diffusion races past Dall-E in both relevancy and raw power. The pervasive assumption is that the same thing will happen for large language models – aka text. | Will this be good for the internet? Almost certainly. Will one of the biggest companies on the planet go down without a hell of a fight? | We’ll see. Stay tuned. | ON THE INTERNETS | Absurdly endearing lander simulator game that’ll waste hours of your time | Another fascinating browser game, but this one’s called The Evolution of Trust | Untold story of the boldest supply chain hack ever | Will AI become the new McKinsey? | Shopify lays off 20% | How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed (Perhaps my new favorite way to tell an essay.) | Viewing yourself as a complex dynamic system | The internet isn’t made to be so small | The working life of Haruki Murakami | TWEET OF THE WEEK |  | lucy ford 🍊 @lucyj_ford |  |
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me, 31, chatting to my colleagues in their 20s |  | | | Apr 23, 2023 | | |  | | | 33.5K Likes 3.29K Retweets 88 Replies |
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