People have a lot of hope and expectations from OpenAI, at the same time, a lot of them are actually scared and jealous of the Microsoft-funded company. Everyone wants to have their own ‘ChatGPT moment’ in AI, but no one has been able to come even close to what OpenAI did. Google tried with Bard, and arguably, failed to deliver even with active internet connection. 

Google brought back DeepMind into the picture to up the ante. OpenAI should be jittery at the moment, with its employees leaving to join Google DeepMind. Moreover, the founder of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, recently claimed that the company’s next LLM project is going to eclipse ChatGPT. This huge claim is about the project called Gemini. Similar to GPT-4, this LLM is also expected to be multimodal and combine abilities from AlphaGo, the company’s reinforcement learning-based system that has the capabilities of planning, reasoning, and problem solving. 

What exactly gives Gemini an edge over GPT?

Starting with whatever is happening around Reddit, Twitter, and Elon Musk, there is a possibility that the Tesla-head may actually go ahead and acquire Reddit. Interestingly, Musk’s plan to build a “woke ChatGPT” rival, which is possibly built on Twitter data, might include the data from Reddit as well. The reason this looks plausible is because Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman has been praising Musk’s way of managing and handling Twitter amid the troubles that his platform is going through. 

That said, DeepMind with Google has something that no one else has – YouTube. While Twitter is filled with textual data, YouTube is a gold mine for visual, audio, and textual data in almost every single language on Earth. Moreover, the videos that exist on YouTube are not just memes or reels like Twitter or Instagram, but are also filled with tutorials, lectures, and podcasts.

If Google DeepMind claims that Gemini is going to be multimodal, it might actually have the best understanding and generating model out there right now. For DeepMind, getting data from YouTube is actually the best thing it could have asked for – multimodal, multilingual, and multiregional. Moreover, DeepMind, being based out of London, actually found itself restricted by the stringent EU laws around regulating AI. Now that it is again a part of the US-based Google, it can actually benefit from the laws that govern the parent company. If we talk about the legal issues around this, interestingly, Google’s privacy policy clearly states that it has the right to use the videos for its purposes, even if the users’ have the copyright. 

On the flip side, while OpenAI has been claiming that Google’s Bard was trained on ChatGPT data, there are allegations that OpenAI also used its Whisper model to train on YouTube’s data by converting audio to text. The tables have turned for OpenAI.

OpenAI isn’t scared enough

Most recently, when Altman and Ilya Sutskever visited Israel on the on-going world tour, they were met with a very direct and blunt question from someone from the audience. “What is the secret sauce of ChatGPT?”, also talking about if developers who are trying to replicate its capabilities using open source models like LLaMa, Falcon, or Vicuna would ever be able to catch up with OpenAI’s offering, or should they just give up?

To this, Sutskever said that open source is nowhere close. Even though someone would replicate the technology in the coming years, which is inevitable, OpenAI would already be a lot more ahead with what it is building. 

OpenAI is proud of what it has built. When Sam Altman came to India, he was asked if a team of people would be able to build what OpenAI has built, to which he said that it is “not possible”hopeless” to think about it. The only advantage that OpenAI always had was Microsoft’s backing and the first-mover advantage, something that Google has been trying to get over for the last two years.

Hassabis’ stance on risks of AI hasn’t been clear. He earlier voted for a pause on giant AI experiments and now is building to compete with OpenAI. So, while OpenAI expands its office to London to give DeepMind some tension, DeepMind with Google is going to be trouble for Microsoft and OpenAI back in the US.

There is no way that the AI revolution is at its peak, since the leaders are still climbing high, while trying to pull the other down.