Google goes from laggard to leader, pulls ahead of OpenAI with stellar AI growth

reuters.com

5 points·m-hodges··7 comments

Open AI the hare had an exciting sprint and is now a bit winded. Google the tortoise is going to keep plugging along.

LLMs give me flashbacks to the self-driving car race 9 years ago. Uber, Tesla and other flashy companies were drawing a great deal of attention to themselves and burning a lot of investor capital making it appear as though real progress was being made.

Google (rebranded Waymo) ducked the hype, stayed the course, and kept their nose to the grindstone, and now they're the only western company that matters.

The tortoise metaphor doesn't really fit for Google's current AI pace. They've been shipping more than any other company in the field for the last year.

Um... apart from the Chinese?

China is not just one company... And Google has been recently putting out more than any one of them AFAIK.

they let a thousand tortoises bloom.

The "innovator's dilemma" seems to have a new chapter: having enough TPU capacity to simply out-brute-force the competition once the direction is clear. It's less about "who built it first" and more about "who has the most H100s/TPUs and a decent enough compiler."

Google was building TPUs before OpenAI existed, they wrote the paper that made OpenAI, by most accounts they were first and have far more experience operating these systems at scale in both hardware and users

The writing has been on the wall since Ilya left, OpenAI is in decline. Recent news at Microsoft, Nvidia backing out of a deal, decreased enterprise usage... seems to indicate the trend is deepening and OpenAI is on a path to becoming the favorite example of the anti-Ai crowd when it all finally comes crumbling down

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