[LINK] Open Source May Yet Eat Google’s and OpenAI’s AI Lunch

[Kim Holburn]

https://thenewstack.io/open-source-may-yet-eat-googles-and-openais-ai-lunch/

Jun 19th, 2023 6:00am by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols <https://thenewstack.io/author/sjvn/>

Recent AI progress by the open source community has prompted a reevaluation of strategy for Google and OpenAI.

A recently leaked Google memo reveals that while Microsoft and Google are getting all the generative AI hype, open source developers 
may yet win the market battle.

A Google AI engineer wrote, “The uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this [Generative AI] arms race, and neither is 
OpenAI <https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither>. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been 
quietly eating our lunch.” And, who is this hidden third party? Amazon Web Services 
<https://aws.amazon.com/?utm_content=inline-mention> (AWS)? IB? Baidu? It’s none of them. It’s the open source community.

How can that be? Doesn’t Generative AI require hyperscale clouds to deliver large language models (LLM) 
<https://thenewstack.io/large-language-models-arent-the-silver-bullet-for-conversational-ai/> provided high-quality answers? Ah, 
actually, no, no, it doesn’t.

It turns out you can run LLMs on a smartphone: People are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 
<https://twitter.com/thiteanish/status/1635678053853536256> at five LLM tokens 
<https://txt.cohere.com/llm-parameters-best-outputs-language-ai/> per second. While others have shown, you can finetune a 
personalized AI on your laptop in an evening. <https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora>

In other words, “Being able to personalize a language model in a few hours on consumer hardware is a big deal, particularly for 
aspirations that involve incorporating new and diverse knowledge in near real-time.”

...

Reevaluation

The recent progress by the open source community has prompted a reevaluation of strategy for Google and OpenAI. The rapid 
innovation, combined with the lack of usage restrictions, makes open source AI models an attractive alternative for many users.

...

As our Google mystery developer said, “Directly Competing With Open Source Is a Losing Proposition. … we should not expect to be 
able to catch up. The modern internet runs on open source <https://openuk.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/State-of-Open-Phase-Two.pdf> 
for a reason. Open source has some significant advantages that we cannot replicate.”


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
+61 404072753
mailto:kim at holburn.net   aim://kimholburn
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