Who's Winning the AI Race
14:20 Share

A year after sample firing and rehiring and open a ee who is actually winning the gene A I war P. A daily brief is a daily podcast in video about the most important news and discussions in A I to join the conversation, follow the disclosing in our shown notes. Hello friends, we are right smart in the thick of turkey and match potato related hangovers, which means that we're going to do something a little bit different for today's episode.

The a ideally brief IT was almost exactly a year ago when the open a eyebrow fired, sam Allen causing other chaos, not only at OpenAI, but totally opening up the sense of the possible when I came to the competition in the A I space more broadly. Now of course, we know that alan was eventually reinstated, but now a year on, I think it's interesting to ask as exist sted on wednesday, who's winning the AI race? So what we're going to do today is go through company by company, specifically the frontier labs, discuss where they are and what that says about how the competition evolving.

And lets start with microsoft, the partner who was potentially most going to be impacted by altman's firing. You may remember that during that whole episode, C E O thought in nadella a effectively invited ulmen to bring over the entire OpenAI team into microsoft. In fact, they announce that IT was a done deal that was part of the pressure that ultimately LED to sam altman being reinstated.

But they were clearly going to be consequences with that microsoft relationship. The net of those consequences became clear a few months later in march when the team from inflection, which had raised about a billion and a half dollars just a year before, was gutted to come join a new division inside microsoft to coordinate all their AI efforts. That new division would be LED by mustafa, a solution who is both the cofounder of deep mind in, later, the cofounder of inflection.

To me, this read very clearly like a hedge from microsoft when I came to their relationship with OpenAI, an unwillingness to let the vagaries of that company ultimately shaped their place in the AI battle. What the things, however, that i've said frequently is that just because they felt like they had to make this hedge doesn't mean that they're lying when they say things like they still want the relationship with OpenAI to be great. My sense is that, remember, microsoft deal with OpenAI has this very weird clause where when OpenAI hits A G I, as determined by the OpenAI board, microsoft commercial relationship ceases to exist.

In other words, the OpenAI board has a lot of power to shape microsoft financial destiny when IT comes to their relationship with OpenAI. That sound a very comfortable position, especially after you've seen the board behave in a way that some might call a precious. In other words, he felt me like from a sheer for ducey duty point of view, microsoft to hedged that relationship a little bit more.

And so bringing in this very senior team kindly just made sense. Now obviously, microsoft done a lot more. They've continued to try to roll out copilot across all of their products at varying levels of success.

They're now hoping into the agent era. But by and large, I think the twenty twenty four will be seen as a restructuring and infrastructure year when IT comes to that particular company. What about open a ee? There were a few notice moments.

First, the company showed way back in february that they still had some serious chops when I came to the state of the art blowing people away when they announced sora. Sora was, of course, their video generation model. Over to this day, we still haven't actually gotten access to IT other, of course, then a leak earlier this week where some of the artists who had early access share discreetly a version of IT on hugging face.

For much of the year, OpenAI has been unable to escape drama around leadership. Numerous senior executives, including co ma maladie, have left co founders alia suits cover. And under carpathia left ila is specifically to build a competing frontier lab that wouldn't concern itself with triffitt's like revenue and business models.

And more recently, open eye has been at the forefront of this question of whether we're facing limitations in our current scaling models for front model performance. OpenAI is currently investing a lot more in reasoning models and test time compute and a number of other strategies. But notably, what we haven't gotten this year in which sam altman has pledged that we will not get is any version of GPT five.

That inner of itself seems to suggest, or at least then created to the idea that there may be a platos that we're reaching. Although with riptide tweet like this one from sammon, where he said there is no wall, there is also some denial of that. One of the companies that is benefit at the most from opening eyes turbulence, is lead competitor anthropic men.

Low ventures recently did a report called the state of generate A I in the enterprise, and they found that where as opening eye share of enterprise business had dropped from fifty to thirty four percent this year, and tropics had doubled from twelve to twenty four percent. In other words, anthropy c closed the gap with OpenAI from a thirty eight percent differential to a ten percent different title, at least in the enterprise. Of course, opening ee is still way ahead when IT comes to consumer revenue, but IT shows that anthropic is absolutely not just also ran for much of the year.

They caught three point five model was seen as the best. But even more than that, I think where on topic has really excelled and push the pedal to the metal and forced open a ee to respond to them is with features and user experience. In may, their new chief product officer was instagram cofounder my cragg.

Their artifacts feature, which separates the creation and input panel from the output panel using cloud, makes the previous element face feel old and clunky, and forced others like ChatGPT to copy them, and they continued to push out new features. I just recently talked about their new style precepts, where you can both create a style that imitate your own writing style, as well as just create a set of presets that match any particular style you want. Importantly though, this is embedded in the U I U, X, rather than being something that you have to prompt.

Now I don't think that with these features alone, in tropic will begin ground and up A I. It's also because their models are performing really well. One company that seemingly had a harder year is mystery. Mystery is a french lab that in the second half of last year really took on the banner of open source, effectively competing for narrow mind share in that space with meta. And according to same mental study, their market share of enterprise aleem use actually went down from six to five percent this year.

From outside, IT seems to me like they're struggling to keep up with the huge budgets that other companies have while also obtaining their open source roots until I think it'll be an important one to watch, if only because I might indicate something about just how chAllenging IT is to compete in the frontier lab space. Today's episode is brought to you by vantage, whether you're starting or scaling your company security program, demonstrating top notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever. Penta automates compliance for I S O twenty seven O O one soc two gdpr and leading A I framework works like I S O forty two thousand one and N I S T A I risk management framework, saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust, plus you consume line security reviews by automating questionnaire and demonstrating your security posture with a customer facing trust center. All power by vent to A I. Over eight thousand global companies like lang chain lead A I in factory A I use vantage to demonstrate A I trust, improve security in real time, learn more adventist c com slash N W that's ventadour com slash .

N W today's eps ode is brought to you, as always, by super intelligent. Have you ever wanted an A I daily brief but totally focused on how A I relates to your company? Is your company struggling with a AI adoption, either because you're getting figuring out what use cases will drive value or because the A I transformation that is happening is illative individual teams, departments and employees and not able to change the company as a whole?

Super intelligence has developed a new customer internal podcast product that inspires your teams by sharing the best A I use cases from inside and outside your company. Think of IT is an A I daily brief, but just for your company's A I use cases, if you'd like to learn more, go to A B superdad ice slash partner and fill out the information request form. I am really excited about this product, so I will personally get right back again. That's be super di I slash partner.

And then of course, there is meta, the one among the big tex who has anchor their flag to open source. And it's continued to push in that theme all year as fortune sharing golden recently put IT mark zaki g has fully rebuilt, met a around lama. The company released lama three point one this year, including their large four of five b model.

And they are aggressively weaving, generate A I from their models into all of their products. They're taking full advantage, in other words, of the distribution channels they have via WhatsApp, instagram, facebook to get people interacting with A I. What's more, they also starting to provide the business use case by showing how A I enabled add production in those platforms is out performing when people don't use A I.

Meta hasn't necessarily been the most loud when IT comes to A I this year, but they are carving out a very important, very powerful spot and should not be faded. Interestingly, there also have been recent reports the meta is trying to get the U. S.

To adopt ma as their A, I standard, of course, in the wake of downa trumping elected president zk berg is hardly the only big tech leader joking for position. No person Better represents text shift to the ride to Donald trump more than elon musk. Mask, of course, went all in with trump towards the end of the campaign and has since been seen as being extremely influential during the transition process.

There are, of course, questions already around how long met influence will last that are way outside the scope of this A I show. But IT certainly is part of the texture of the A I story for five in the decisions that are made by the trump point house will have a big impact on this industry. Meanwhile, in land's X, A, I will not necessarily releasing a hugely disruptive model.

Rock is still available, primarily just in twitter. Raised money at first day, twenty four billion, and more recently, a fifty billion dollars, uh, reflecting, I think, the power of a built in distribution channel like twitter, but also the strength of the conventional wisdom, which is not to bet against d laan. Apparently X A I is also going to have a consumer up soon, which could give IT more a chance to actually compete with ChatGPT.

One thing that in line does appear to be influential. Is who trump is going to choose as his a isr. The trump team is apparently considering elevating a White house senior position to focus on artificial intelligence, which again could have a huge impact on how this industry evolves over the next couple of years.

For some other big taxi OS, musk is uncomfortable ly in the middle of their contact with Donald trump. Most notably, he recently joined the call where google, CEO and arctic. I called to congratulate trump.

A highly uncomfortable conversation, one has to imagine. But let's use this to talk about google. Google year and A I did knock IT off to a great start. First of all, the perception of being behind OpenAI and having surrendered their lead. A, I has dogged google basically for the last two years.

IT felt rushed, enforced when they announced mi last december, exemplified by the fact that the most performance version of the model wasn't actually going to be available for a number of months. What's worse, google's year got off to a very controversial start when google attempts to combat bia N. A.

I ended up producing images that had, among other things, racially diverse, not sees. Google ended up having to take their image generation model offline for a while, and ultimately apologized for, quote, missing the mark with IT. And yet none of that will be the story that people remember from google from twenty twenty four, when IT comes to A I.

Instead, what they will remember is no book alone, which is many people's vote for this single best A I product of the year. Noble glam has a very specific feature, the ability to take a bunch of written material and turn IT into an audio podcast discussion between two hosts. IT is fully automated and generated theyve added the ability also to guide and customize IT, and the results are really, really impressive.

People are using IT to change the way they study. They're using IT to change the way they distribute information inside of work, is an incredibly powerful tool and is put some win back in the sales of google. From a product perspective.

At super intelligent, we deal exclusively with big enterprise customers. And no book at lam has really got people excited even after to a couple days ago, you were getting stories like this one in Z D net. Even in video.

CEO was obsessed with google snowball L A I tool. You know the words google has a lot Better momentum heading into next year than they did heading into twenty twenty four. Speak over video.

We're not going to get into their continued dominance in the chip space. But I will note that quietly, they keep dropping their own models that perform really well. And one has to wonder how they're thinking about the long term of that company and how much is strictly focused on chips.

Speaking of chips, one big tech player that is clearly focused on chips is amazon. Amazon has invested eight billion dollars now in anthropic this year, and it's very clear that the trust of the investment is about anthropic collaboration on amazon's traian chips. This is clearly the vector or that y've decided to compete even though it's still quite early.

And lastly, there's apple at the world's developers conference, we finally got information around how they were going to approach A I. Of course, we're branding at apple intelligence instead of artificial intelligence and weaving in into their iphone. And the optimistic take was that apple was going to really focus on A I for Normal people to bring A I to experiences that were simple, everyday and radically improved by the presence of A I.

That vision hasn't flopped, but IT also certainly hasn't fully come to bury yet. Many of those features still are available, the ones that are only available in the most advanced hardware. And unfortunately for apple, the iphone sixteen isn't selling as well as they had hoped.

IT is much too early to count apple out of anything, but twenty twenty four wasn't really a huge one for them when IT comes to A I. And so that's the landscape from where i'm sitting right now on the question of who's winning the air race, IT is still well and truly anyone's game that in of itself, I think, is a Victory for all of us. And if nothing else, will keep this podcast interesting for some time to come. For now, that is going to do a for today's day, ideally brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace.