The AI Wars heat up
While all the big players have been polite - the jockeying in the ecosystem to be the AI leader is heating up as Microsoft gets more vocal around their plans and investments and Google is getting more active in their public voice around AI all the way up to Sundar Pichai.
Generative AI Business Updates:
Google Speaks
Google regularly publishes research and product updates related to AI on their AI Blog (sometimes promoted by Sundar Pichai). This week they publishes (co-signed by the CEO) a statement on why they are focused on AI that gives more insight on their focus, direction and hesitations.
Microsoft will integrate OpenAI across office suite
In addition to releasing Azure OpenAI services, Microsoft confirmed that they will work OpenAI assistants into product across Office365 suite. It will be interesting to see if they are able to learn from and retrieve content from user documents. We’ll also get to see if they revive the Clippy brand and launch them as Clippy 2.0.
More details on MSFT investment in OpenAI
Unclear how accurate these reports are, but it’s clearly not a straightforward venture deal and likely includes some repayment to MSFT from OpenAI profits. An interesting structure given how much OpenAI revenue will likely come from Microsoft itself.
Another Competitor: Claude?
Anthropic’s ChatGPT competitor (in closed Beta) continues to generate rumblings of improvement over ChatGPT. Will be interesting to see if they join forces with a large player like MSFT-OpenAI. It seems unlikely Google would partner.
Generative AI Tech Updates:
GPT Index simplifies adding external content capabilities to GPT3
GPT Index makes it easy to include large datasets in GPT without creating custom models. The project provides a set of Python tools (storage + connectors) to easily integrate documents from popular tools into a prompt-able interface backed by a vector data store.
Generative AI Educational Updates:
A deeper dive on how ChatGPT works:
Andrej Karpathy provides a detailed deep dive on how GPT works and how to build from scratch. There are MANY generativeAI explainers out there but few by elite academic like Andrej. He was a founding scientist at OpenAI and head of AI at Tesla, so I would trust this explainer over others.