Documents allegedly written by a senior Google engineer leaked Thursday on the site Semianalysis. The document shows growing concern that as artificial intelligence tools explode into every aspect of our lives, there is no gatekeeper to keep an eye on things. Google is not cutting edge. The creator of ChatGPT, he does OpenAI as well.
“The unpleasant truth is,” Google’s Luke Thurnow wrote: While we were arguing, a third party was quietly eating lunch. Of course, I’m talking about open source. Quite frankly, they’re cornering us. “
TL;DR: AI can’t be stopped because anyone can play. Also, all discussions about “guardrails” and “moratoriums” are academic. https://t.co/MAHIYAzrER
— Pedro Domingos (@pmddomingos) May 5, 2023
The Google engineer’s note quickly became the top story on AI forums, including the popular message board HackerNews and Reddit’s /r/MachineLearning community, which has over 2.6 million members, and provoked comments from some of the biggest names in the AI world.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the memo was genuine and came from a Google engineer, but said it was the opinion of one senior employee and not necessarily the company as a whole. .
“We have been thinking a lot about OpenAI. But the uncomfortable truth is that we are not in a position to win this arms race, and neither is OpenAI.”
Open source tools, now in the hands of millions, enable individuals and small groups to compete and overcome what were once seen as obstacles to further progress in AI. They build tools that are faster, smaller, and easier to update. Some of these AI models can run on a system as small as a phone and give better results than those running on whole fast computers.
This is more than just a challenge to the dominance of big tech companies. This shows that AI development has reached a stage where no one can step on the brakes.
“Of course, I am talking about open source. It’s shrinking so fast.”
Tech companies have spent years developing AI in an arms race behind the scenes, and with the release of ChatGPT came OpenAI. Other generative AI systems that can create content based on user prompts have surged in popularity and quality. OpenAI announced a major deal with Google competitor Microsoft in January. In response, Google rushed to release a corresponding program, Bard.
A Google engineer said:
“Individuals with open source tools do things with $100, but we struggle with $10 million.”
He said the only option for Google if it wants to be on the cutting edge again is to stop treating AI as something special to them and try to learn from people who are already outperforming large internal projects. claim.
“We don’t have a secret sauce. Our greatest desire is to learn from and collaborate with other companies besides Google.”
Google employees say that both Google and Microsoft have a growing community of programmers and companies that rely on publicly available AI code and models, known as “open source,” to create smaller but more efficient projects. I wrote ignoring it.
Some experts and industry analysts agreed with the memo’s warnings. OpenAI founder Andrey Karpathy, who returned to the company in February, wrote on Twitter on Saturday that the rise of smaller AI companies competing with big tech companies is starting to shake up the industry.
Tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT have been a big part of the national talk about rapid changes in the AI space over the past year. As Business Insider reports, major companies, including the creators of these tools, are scrambling to steal software talent in the race to lead his own AI development. But as Selnau’s memo makes clear, those efforts have failed, and the tools being pursued by the big companies are far from “cutting edge,” even if they are out there.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is how quickly this happened. The open-source community didn’t actually dabble in large-scale proprietary AI models until early March, when the code behind Facebook’s large-scale language model meta-AI (Llama) was leaked online. The tool came out there with absolutely no instructions or hints to change it into anything other than the kind of chatbot that Facebook created. It didn’t matter.
All of this shows how futile efforts to slow rapid change in the field, such as a letter published at the end of March in which more than 1,000 experts called for a “pause” in AI development, are in fact futile. It becomes clear that there is
The letter stated that AI experiments “posed grave risks to society and humanity” and that the AI Institute “has a great deal of power to develop and deploy a more powerful digital mind that no one, not even its creators, can comprehend.” We are in an uncontrollable race,” he warned. , predict or control with certainty. But the call to “immediately suspend training of AI systems stronger than GPT-4 for at least six months for all AI laboratories” is a slam dunk for companies looking to gain an edge over their competitors. At some point it was already useless for gatherings.
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