It is all about perception until it becomes about results. Yes, IBM went to the mountain, trumpeting the new age of exponential computing, as IBM Watson touched the face of the future when it won Jeopardy! Fast forward today, no one remembers IBM as Big Tech enters an injury time on who wins the race of natural language computing.
OpenAI opened the race, gaining a lot of meters. But Google understands that its future is imperiled if it does not respond. And the company is responding, promising a ChatGPT rival, in the next few weeks: “AI is the most profound technology we are working on today…people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding”. Google named the chatbot Bard!
People, what happens in the next 18 months will determine many things on the future of consumer technology. The winner of this competition will win in the near future because if it bakes these AI systems into cloud computing solutions, a new basis of competition will emerge. In other words, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc are in the race of the operating system for modern digital empires.
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Yet, Google does not need to win this race to thrive. And Microsoft does not need to win outright to thrive. The key is making sure you can keep your tribe by having an optimal product that ensures they do not leave.
Indeed, I left Dropbox when Microsoft unveiled OneDrive, not because OneDrive was better, but largely because I already use Microsoft for many things – and could easily bundle my Microsoft 365 with the OneDrive. That means Google has to make its Bard, not bad, to keep its tribes; it may not need to be super-great.
AI is the most profound technology we are working on today. Whether it’s helping doctors detect diseases earlier or enabling people to access information in their own language, AI helps people, businesses and communities unlock their potential. And it opens up new opportunities that could significantly improve billions of lives. That’s why we re-oriented the company around AI six years ago — and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Since then we’ve continued to make investments in AI across the board, and Google AI and DeepMind are advancing the state of the art. Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. At the same time, advanced generative AI and large language models are capturing the imaginations of people around the world. In fact, our Transformer research project and our field-defining paper in 2017, as well as our important advances in diffusion models, are now the basis of many of the generative AI applications you’re starting to see today.
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No sleeping on the bicycle, everyone working on AI products, the markets will call the results soon.
Is Bard planning to ask us the same ‘What’s on your mind’ Facebook used to tire us out? We are no longer ready to tell any of them what’s really on our minds.
Game on.
Interesting, no data privacy issues have been raised. Hopefully, AI won’t face the storm like Meta did. This new wave of Generative pre-trained tranformer has really stirred up a frenzy.