Thee years ago, What does a leaked Google memo reveal about the future of AI?

Now techies are abuzz about another memo, this time leaked from within Google, titled “We have no moat”. Its unknown author details the astonishing progress being made in artificial intelligence (AI)—and challenges some long-held assumptions about the balance of power in this fast-moving industry.

“The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organisation to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop,” the Google memo claims. An LLM can now be fine-tuned for $100 in a few hours. With its fast-moving, collaborative and low-cost model, “open-source has some significant advantages that we cannot replicate.” Hence the memo’s title: this may mean Google has no defensive “moat” against open-source competitors. Nor, for that matter, does OpenAI.

Absolutely hilarious how US companies bet the farm on subscription based AI products, and now the whole business model is falling apart. This might be the first time that Silicon Valley is facing direct competition with some new tech it's developing. And the interesting part here is that they're facing a different business model, Chinese companies aren’t looking for direct monetization. They’re treating models as shared infrastructure, sort of what we already see happening with Linux. Most companies don’t try to monetize it directly, they build stuff like AWS on top of it and that becomes the product. I expect American companies are just going to run out of runway in the near future because they’re getting squeezed by open Chinese models which undercut their entire business model.

AI cloning AI...
AI inbreeding?

The original training data of GPT-4 is very valuable information