It’s somewhat surprising to me the way this is shaking out. I would expect DeepMind and OpenAI’s AGI research to be competing with one another*. But here it looks like Google is the engine of competition, less motivated by any future focused ideas about AGI more just by the fact that their core search/ad business model appears to be threatened by OpenAI’s AGI research.
I don’t think it’s obvious that Google alone is the engine of competition here, it’s hard to expect any company to simply do nothing if their core revenue generator is threatened (I’m not justifying them here), they’re likely to try to compete rather than give up immediately and work on other ways to monetiz. It’s interesting to note that it just happened to be the case that Google’s core revenue generator (search) is a possible application area of one of the LLMs, the fastest progressing/most promising area of AI research right now. I don’t think OpenAI pursued LLMs for this reason (to compete with Google), and instead pursued them because they’re promising, but interesting to note that search and LLMs are both bets on language being the thing to bet on.
You’re right—I wasn’t very happy with my word choice calling Google the ‘engine of competition’ in this situation. The engine was already in place and involves the various actors working on AGI and the incentives to do so. But these recent developments with Google doubling down on AI to protect their search/ad revenue are revving up that engine.
It’s somewhat surprising to me the way this is shaking out. I would expect DeepMind and OpenAI’s AGI research to be competing with one another*. But here it looks like Google is the engine of competition, less motivated by any future focused ideas about AGI more just by the fact that their core search/ad business model appears to be threatened by OpenAI’s AGI research.
*And hopefully cooperating with one another too.
I don’t think it’s obvious that Google alone is the engine of competition here, it’s hard to expect any company to simply do nothing if their core revenue generator is threatened (I’m not justifying them here), they’re likely to try to compete rather than give up immediately and work on other ways to monetiz. It’s interesting to note that it just happened to be the case that Google’s core revenue generator (search) is a possible application area of one of the LLMs, the fastest progressing/most promising area of AI research right now. I don’t think OpenAI pursued LLMs for this reason (to compete with Google), and instead pursued them because they’re promising, but interesting to note that search and LLMs are both bets on language being the thing to bet on.
You’re right—I wasn’t very happy with my word choice calling Google the ‘engine of competition’ in this situation. The engine was already in place and involves the various actors working on AGI and the incentives to do so. But these recent developments with Google doubling down on AI to protect their search/ad revenue are revving up that engine.