Google engineer warns it could lose out to open-source technology in AI race
Google has been warned by one of its engineers that the company is not in a position to win the artificial intelligence race and could lose out to commonly available AI technology.
A document from a Google engineer leaked online said the company had done “a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI”, referring to the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot.
However, the worker, identified by Bloomberg as a senior software engineer, wrote that neither company was in a winning position.
“The uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch,” the engineer wrote.
The engineer went on to state that the “third faction” posing a competitive threat to Google and OpenAI was the open-source community.
Open-source technology developers are not proprietorial and release their work for anyone to use, improve or adapt as they see fit. Historical examples of open-source work include the Linux operating system and LibreOffice, an alternative to Microsoft Office.
The Google engineer said open-source AI developers were “already lapping us”, citing examples including tools based on a large language model developed by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which was made available by the company on a “noncommercial” and case-by-case basis in February but leaked online shortly after.
Since Meta’s LLaMA model became widely available, the document added, the barrier to entry for working on AI models has dropped “from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop”.
The document also cited websites filled with open-source visual art generation models. By contrast, Chat GPT and Google’s Bard chatbot do not
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