According to reports, OpenAI not only succeeded in surpassing Google with its artificial intelligence chatbot, but also accidentally contributed to another thing that was almost impossible to happen: this forced Alphabet’s Google and DeepMind’s two major artificial intelligence The research team temporarily put aside their grievances for many years and decided to join forces to catch up with OpenAI.
Software engineers at Google Brain are working with DeepMind employees on software to rival OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter. DeepMind is an artificial intelligence laboratory owned by Alphabet. Google previously launched the Bard chatbot to challenge OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but it accidentally overturned at the demo site. Shortly thereafter, Alphabet decided to launch this joint project called Gemini.
Bard’s release was also affected internally by the resignation of a prominent Google AI researcher who warned Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other executives about the project’s development.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, but the relationship between DeepMind and Google Brain is more of a competitor than a collaborator. Both companies are racing to improve Google’s products and services and seek scientific breakthroughs. But now, both of Alphabet’s artificial intelligence labs believe that OpenAI has surpassed itself. Additionally, startups are poaching their key engineers and researchers.
OpenAI released ChatGPT in November last year, a chatbot that mimics human answers and has become one of the fastest-growing applications ever. Google’s own chatbot, Bard, which was made available to some users last week, appears to be inferior to ChatGPT in some tasks.
Jeff Dean, Google’s most senior director of artificial intelligence research and head of Google Brain, has taken on a technical role in the Gemini project, writing code that will help Google develop a technology comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4, people familiar with the matter said. machine learning model. This is enough to see the importance of Gemini within Alphabet.
This measure also reflects Google’s adjustment of product roadmaps in various departments such as search and cloud to cope with the competition brought about by the cooperation between OpenAI and Microsoft. OpenAI has integrated technologies such as ChatGPT into Microsoft products, and Microsoft provides funding and computing power support for the startup.
But Gemini somewhat had to do it as a last resort. Alphabet’s two AI labs rarely collaborate with each other or share code with each other. But people familiar with the matter said that since both parties now hope to develop machine learning models that compete with OpenAI, and both require a lot of computing power, Alphabet can only reluctantly force the two to cooperate.
Bard’s Road, Full of Controversy and Concern
The accidental rollover during Bard’s presentation revealed Google’s problems. The chatbot’s development was so controversial that it led Jacob Devlin, a prominent Google artificial intelligence engineer, to join OpenAI soon after he resigned in January, according to people familiar with the matter. Devlin is the lead author of a groundbreaking paper showing how to train machine learning models to improve their ability to understand groups of sentences—an innovation that OpenAI has incorporated into its language models .
Devlin left after expressing concerns to Pichai, Dean and other executives on the Bard team. Bard’s team enlisted help from Google Brain employees and also used OpenAI’s ChatGPT data to train its machine learning model. Specifically, Devlin believes that the Bard team appears to be relying too much on information from ShareGPT — a website where people post their conversations with ChatGPT.
Some Google employees believe that using such chat logs would violate OpenAI’s terms of service, because the latter clearly states on its official website that the use of “output … to develop models that compete with OpenAI” is prohibited. Devlin also told executives that he was concerned that Bard’s answers would be too similar to ChatGPT’s if one relied too much on ChatGPT chat logs shared on ShareGPT.
After Devlin expressed concern, Google stopped using ChatGPT data to train Bard, people familiar with the matter said. Part of the leadership of the Bard team is being led by Sissie Hsiao, a vice president who previously oversaw Google Assistant, a voice assistant similar to Apple’s Siri.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on Devlin’s departure or concerns. An OpenAI spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
When the search offensive and defensive battle is in progress
OpenAI has taken the lead in the recent AIGC (generative artificial intelligence) battle, but the exact business impact on Alphabet is unclear. Despite ChatGPT’s many mistakes, millions of people already use it and the technology behind it to quickly generate blog posts, summarize meeting points, create spreadsheets, and accomplish a variety of tasks.
The product has generated little revenue so far, but that could change. With the help of OpenAI, Microsoft has integrated functions similar to ChatGPT in its own search engine, hoping to increase its search market share. However, Microsoft has not yet taken much share from Google. But OpenAI seems to have ushered in a whole new era: applications can already understand what users ask through natural language.
Gemini’s goal is to develop a large language model (a computer program that can understand and generate human-like language) and will use up to 1 trillion parameters (this metric can be used to measure the computational load of machine learning models). GPT-4 also reportedly has around 1 trillion parameters. Google’s projects require the use of tens of thousands of TPUs. The TPU is a microchip developed by Google that is similar to Nvidia’s GPU and is ideal for training large machine learning models. However, it may take several months for Gemini to produce actual results.
Meanwhile, as Google scrambles to incorporate AI into its own products, other groups at the company are developing their own big language models. Pandu Nayak, the Google executive who oversees search ranking, has been working on a separate model that he hopes will handle specific search requests. And Google Cloud is also developing its own model to sell to cloud service customers, similar to what OpenAI or Microsoft currently offer.
