Is Google catching up? Is Generative AI going private?
There are some subtle changes among all the AI craziness that keeps pumping new releaseas every week.
As I took a break from writing, I continued to observe the rapid development of AI technology and the push to stick an AI label to anything and everywhere.
🙋♂️ First of all, besides the cover picture which will most likely be generated by Misjourney, the content in this newsletter is 100% human written. Thank you, Catalina, for the heads up, I guess we have to point this out from now on.
It’s pointless to recap everything new in the last weeks, there are countless other sources of minute-by-minute reporting on what’s new in AI, but some interesting novelties and changes are worth discussing.
The now famous Google internal memo that leaked confirmed somehow a trend I was seeing. If you live under a virtual rock, the leaked memo claims that the company (Google) is losing its competitive edge in the field of artificial intelligence to open-source projects and that research is being chocked by bureaucracy and a lack of focus.
And I think that is 100% a valid concern that is being discussed not only at Google, but also at OpenAi, Microsoft, Anthropic, and other big names in AI.
It’s clear that big Generative AI names have started to keep more information to themselves and be less “open”. GPT-4 launched with much fewer details for researchers to read versus the documentation available for GPT-3, Google is trying to keep communication as marketing-focused as possible and Anthropic just announced it’s expanding its context window for Claude (ChatGPT rival) from 9.000 to 100.000 tokens without any technical o research grade information documentation to be analyzed.
Of course, of course, it’s not all smoke and mirrors, but I think the age of open-source love from the big guys is about to end, at least for the hot topic of Generative AI. Accountants and Marketing people will have a say, as always.
Google (as seen at Google I/O event) is focused to protect their Search ad revenue and all the other bells and whistles shown are just complementary to the main scope of keeping the edge for their main revenue driver.
And if we are talking about Google I/O, I have to admit that the latest updates to Bard chatbot are quite impressive.
While OpenAI is keeping ChatGPT browsing mode and add-on away from the general public, Bard is quietly becoming the better bot.
Now, I have yet to do a thorough prompt-based comparison, but I have been using the new version of Bard and I like it.
Not only it’s free and fast, it’s also connected to the internet for actual context and real-life usage and available in over 180 countries.
What else I like about the new Bard Chatbot?
- It can take voice prompts 🎤
- It can export to Google Docs and Gmail 📃
- It has addons (not yet released) 🧱
- It can access internet link and summarize articles 👩🎓
I’m going to reassess if the 20 dollars/ month I’m paying to OpenAI is worth it.