The future of AI is not 'in the hands' of Google or OpenAI

That is the assessment taken from an internal memo of the search giant that was recently revealed. In this document, Google executives expressed deep concern about the possibility of losing the ongoing AI race.

A Google representative later confirmed the authenticity of the document, saying it was just an opinion from a company insider, but admitted they were “not in a position to win this race, and neither is OpenAI.”

The search giant notes that the open source community is beating the leading AI companies, and while their products have a slight edge in quality, “the gap is closing incredibly quickly.”

Capital size is not the core factor

AI has been making waves in the public since late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot based on LLM (large language models) developed by OpenAI, a startup closely associated with Microsoft. The success of this product has prompted Google and many other tech companies to jump into the LLM race.

LLM models are trained on trillions of words from the Internet to generate human-like text or dialogue. This process takes months and costs tens of millions of dollars, leading to concerns that AI will be dominated by “rich, wealthy” technology companies.

AI developed by the open source community is becoming a real competitor to industry giants like Google or OpenAI.

But Google’s internal memo suggests that assumption is wrong. Researchers in the open source community are leveraging free online resources and achieving results comparable to today’s largest proprietary models.

Accordingly, LLMs can be “fine-tuned” through a technique called low-level adaptation, or LoRa, which allows an existing LLM to be optimized for a specific task much more quickly and cheaply than training an LLM from scratch.

For example, in March, LLaMa, a model created by Facebook parent company Meta, was leaked online. Although it was small and relatively “primitive” with only 7 billion parameters, compared to 540 billion parameters in Google’s largest LLM, LLaMa was quickly refined to produce results comparable to the original version of ChatGPT on some tasks.

This could have seismic implications for the future of AI development as “the barriers to training and testing, from requiring a large research center, to requiring just one person, one evening, and a high-end laptop.”

The battle between the giant Goliath and the shepherd David

Now an LLM can be tweaked for just $100 in a few hours. With its flexible, connected, and low-cost model, “open source AI has significant advantages” that large companies like Google cannot replicate. As such, the memo concludes, Google or OpenAI are vulnerable to these open source competitors.

The open source community has advantages that tech giants can't replicate

“I don’t think I need something as powerful as ChatGPT-4 for many tasks,” Simon Willison, a programmer and technology analyst, told NBC. “The question now is how small can the models be and still be useful? And that’s something the open source community is exploring very quickly.”

This is completely similar to the opinion of many experts that the strongest point is also the weakest point if exploited and observed properly, like in the story of the giant Goliath being defeated by the small shepherd boy David with only a slingshot.

However, when it comes to AI development, not everyone may agree with this argument. The fact is that paid proprietary software still exists, such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Windows, and the AI field may follow the same development path.

(According to Economist, YahooFinance)

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