According to a leaked memo, Google has admitted that it cannot compete with open-source artificial intelligence (AI).

The memo reveals how the search engine giant is struggling to keep up with open source AI and suggests a way to regain its dominance. The memo begins by stating that open source as such has always been its main competitor, not OpenAI. Google also admits in the memo that it has already lost the battle for AI dominance and is unable to compete with open source. Although Google currently has a slight technical advantage over open source AI, the gap is closing fast.

Open source AI outperforms Google

The bulk of the memo is about how Google is being outflanked by open source. Open source models are faster, more customizable, simpler and more powerful in every way. Google's size is no longer an advantage. The extremely large size of Google's AI models is seen as a disadvantage in the memo. What seems to be of particular concern to Google is the fact that the open-source movement can scale its projects in a way that closed-source cannot. The leaked memo lists a number of factors that suggest that Google's (and OpenAI's) control over AI could soon be over.

The scope of open source scares Google

The open source community received a leaked open source model in March 2023 with Metas LLaMA. Within days and weeks, the global open source community developed all the necessary components to create Bard and ChatGPT clones. Sophisticated steps such as instruction matching and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) were quickly replicated by the global open source community. It is claimed that the open source Q&A dataset created by Databricks is of higher quality than that of Google and OpenAI, as it was created by thousands of volunteers and professionals.

Open source has historically outperformed closed source

The memo goes on to cite DALL-E, the deep learning model used to generate images from text descriptions, which is available to everyone as open source. OpenAI published a paper on DALL-E in January 2021 and released the code on GitHub. A few months later, EleutherAI, an open source community, developed a similar model called GPT-Neo. The memo emphasizes that open-source AI has outperformed closed-source AI in the past, citing examples such as TensorFlow, PyTorch and other popular libraries.

Google's proposed solution

The memo suggests that Google should focus on having its own open source platform. Google should develop an open-source AI model for natural language processing (NLP) and collaborate with the open-source community. This will ensure that Google remains relevant in the AI landscape. Google should also provide developers with the necessary tools to build on its platform. The memo concludes by stating that Google can't beat open source, but it can work with them and be part of something bigger.

The future of AI

The leaked memo shows that Google is struggling to keep up with the speed and momentum of open source AI. Open source AI is faster, more adaptable and more powerful in every way. The open-source community can scale its projects in a way that closed-source cannot. Google has acknowledged that it cannot compete with open-source AI and is proposing a partnership with the open-source community. The future of AI is open source, and the future is now.

Read the full memo here: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither