🤖 Google's AI confession

Good morning and welcome to the latest issue of neonpulse!

Here are the AI headlines making waves:

🌊  Google’s AI confession

🌊  Microsoft teams up with AMD

🌊  AGI is on the horizon

Let’s get into it!

Google’s AI Confession

A senior engineer at Google just made a confession that might make you rethink your entire perspective of the company as an “indestructible” tech giant.

After becoming increasingly concerned about the potential of AI to disrupt the company’s business, one of Google's top engineers put together a memo admitting that the company is falling behind in the AI arms race.

Titled “We Have No Moat,” engineer Luke Sernau’s memo went into detail about how Google's AI efforts have been stagnating, and how the company currently has no competitive advantage in AI.

"We aren’t positioned to win this arms race, and neither is OpenAI,” wrote Sernau. “While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.”

And the third faction Sernau speaks of?

Open source AI projects.

Thanks to the open sourcing of AI models like Meta’s LLama, AI is becoming democratized, meaning that anyone with a laptop and a desire to tinker can now build their own AI models.

“While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 that we struggle to build for $10,000,000. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.”

This new dynamic has put the tech giant in a highly vulnerable position, but to Sernau there is a clear path forward: open source everything.

“Google should establish itself a leader in the open source community, taking the lead by cooperating with, rather than ignoring, the broader conversation,” Senau wrote.

“By owning the platform where innovation happens, Google cements itself as a thought leader and direction-setter, earning the ability to shape the narrative on ideas that are larger than itself.”

As to how the company would be able to protect it’s search monopoly and monetize the open sourcing of it’s AI technology is not clear, but Google will need to do something soon if it doesn’t want to become a relic of a bygone era, like dinosaurs or our beloved flip phones.

You can check out the full memo here.

Microsoft + AMD

Powering every AI application is very special type of AI microchip, a market that NVIDIA effectively has a monopoly on.

Yet due to the massive increase in demand for AI processing power, there is a growing shortage of AI microchips, a dynamic that is leading a handful of companies to begin developing their own AI chips.

And while Google and Amazon have already begun work on their own AI chips, Microsoft is not far behind thanks to a secret new partnership with microchip manufacturer AMD.

Dr. Lisa Su, AMD's CEO, isn't shy about the collaboration: "We believe the Athena MI300 will redefine the AI processor landscape, providing a new level of performance and energy efficiency."

From the sound of it, Microsoft and AMD plan to challenge NVIDIA's dominance in the AI and GPU arena, a move that could help lower Microsoft’s costs for running AI models and allow them to power ahead of the competition.

AGI Is Around The Corner

While the advances in AI over the past few months have been remarkable, the technology has not yet matched the power of human cognition…

But that moment may arrive sooner than we think.

According to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind, AI systems will reach human-level cognition in as little as 2-3 years.

“The progress in the last few years has been pretty incredible. I don’t see any reason why that progress is going to slow down. I think it may even accelerate.”

In case your not familiar, Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of AI that would possess the same level of intelligence and adaptability as humans, allowing it to perform a wide range of tasks, learn from experience, and reason about complex ideas.

When AGI is achieved it will likely cause massive disruptions in job markets around the world, a possibility that has led OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to become a global advocate for universal basic income.

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