What a shortsighted statement for a race that has barely gotten out of the gates. But, if any one company should be panicking then it's OpenAI at the thought of losing their minimal lead and getting crushed by the company, that invented most of the technology they use, put a significant amount of resources behind their AI initiatives.
Google Search had an outage yesterday. Google just underwent its first round of layoffs ever which definitely affects internal morale and makes all employees aware of their company's mortality. Google's CEO was in the news last week for hiding communications while under a legal hold. Google stock tanked with the rushed demo of Bard. And, even if all those things weren't true, Google has continually failed to establish revenue streams independent from ads and continually abandons products that don't meet their expectations. Consumer confidence in new Google product announcements is lower than any other major tech company - the default assumption is that the product will be pulled months/years later.
Microsoft is giving their full support to OpenAI through their 49% partnership. $13B investment compared to Google buying DeepMind for $500M and investing $300M in Anthropic. Microsoft has good working agreements with the US government, a long history of unreasonable support for their flagship products, clawed their way back to being one of the most valuable companies in the world by finding diverse revenue streams, and, frankly, comes across as the wise adult in the room given they already had their day in the sun with legal battles.
I agree completely that if there continue to be marked revolutions in AI that invalidate current SOTA then those innovations are likely to arise from Google's research labs, but from an execution standpoint I have nothing but concerns for Google. It's crazy that I feel they need a second chance in the AI revolution when LLMs originated from inside their org just a few years ago. And it's not like they don't feel similarly - there've been countless articles about "Code Red" at Google as they try to rapidly adjust their strategy around AI.
I think OpenAI has a wider leader than people are acknowledging. It's like everyone was forced to show their AI-hand the last couple of months, in an attempt to appease shareholders, and it seemed like a fair fight until GPT4 hit the ground running. Now we're looking at agents and multi-modal support ontop of $200M/yr revenue when everyone else has no business plan and has yet to announce any looming upgrades. At a certain point, first-mover advantage compounds, the foremost AI app store becomes established, and people building commercial products will become entrenched.
What a shortsighted statement for a race that has barely gotten out of the gates. But, if any one company should be panicking then it's OpenAI at the thought of losing their minimal lead and getting crushed by the company, that invented most of the technology they use, put a significant amount of resources behind their AI initiatives.