State of the Union – Artificial Intelligence

As we enter the fifth month of the AI “arms race” that kicked off with the introduction of ChatGPT, the pace of new developments in AI doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

The AI world is still abuzz from last week’s leaked Google memo entitled “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI.” The gist of this memo was that it is going to be very difficult for Google to compete with the new open-source AI models like Llama and Open Assistant. However, while it is true that some of these models have “near GPT4” performance on ordinary prompts, once the prompts become more complicated, they can’t hold up. The situation for the billion-dollar mega Large Language Models may not be as dire as portrayed.

The biggest product announcements of the past week have been about integrating the AI models with web information, both by giving the AI the ability to browse the web, as well as through “programming interfaces” (APIs) to give the AI direct access to a huge variety of web services and databases, such as Travelocity, LinkedIn, Zapier, etc. OpenAI had announced plugins in March, but just last week said they are finally ready to roll them out to all users. No word on exactly when this will be completed. Not surprisingly, since they employ the same technology, Microsoft announced that plugins would soon be available for BingChat. And of course, Google can’t be left behind. They announced that plugins would soon be available for Bard.

Google made several other announcements at the annual Google I/O conference last week. These include Bard integration with Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Workspace. In addition, Bard will soon have image capabilities. (As will GPT4). In addition, Bard was moved to the PaLM 2 model. This is roughly the equivalent of ChatGPT moving from GPT3.5 to GPT4 – although the new version of Bard is still not as powerful as GPT4.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft announced a huge collaboration with SAP to deepen the use of AI in recruiting. SAP’s technologies will be integrated into the AI services in Microsoft Azure, as well as the upcoming “Microsoft Co-Pilot”, Microsoft’s upcoming “all powerful” personal assistant.

As the bout between Google and Microsoft continues, countless small players are looking for an advantage. More tech giants are entering the battle as well. Both IBM and Amazon last week announced AI initiatives that will bring new consumer AI applications in the next few months.

At this point, the only thing that seems to be constraining the growth of AI is the lack of hardware.

Nvidia’s H100 graphics cards are the new standard, and using anything else is so much less efficient that it has driven the price of the cards to over $60,000 each. Elon Musk reportedly recently bought

10,000 of these cards for his new “Truth AI” project.

Those are just a few of the recent stories in AI, and the pace just seems to be increasing. We’ll keep you abreast of the changes as they happen.