How the Plot of “AI Wars” Unfolded Between BigTech

The first question that came to my mind after hearing about Sam’s firing as OpenAI CEO was, “Who will play him in the movie or Netflix series of ‘AI wars’ ”? The Silicon Valley’s Game Of Thrones! This movie plot has three main characters — OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta, with the supporting cast including HuggingFace, Google, and Nvidia.

This quintessentially American story has piracy & passion coupled with betrayal & boldness.

The last couple of years has seen everything in ‘Generative AI’, which had the potential silver screen as a corporate thriller. It’s a matter of time before it happened and so here is my take on how the script of the “AI Wars” will unfold.

First Act- When Nobody Cared

• Circa 2014–16, Generative AI has shown promise with some interesting research. Some people used it to write poems by passing images as a prompt; but most execes scoff at the idea of making money from such a tool.
• And there was a transformational paper on Transformer “Attention is all you Need” which did NOT win any award at any conference that year. Even its inventor Google didn't value it nor did the folks who wrote it; failing to retain the talent. One non-profit “OpenAI” did take note though.
• Without anyone noticing, in 2019 a hedging bet was made by a bald genius at Microsoft to invest a few million of change in compute costs at OpenAI when GPT was unknown outside research circles. If it works, it’s a jackpot, and if not, it will still give Azure Cloud the supercomputer and the capacity to train the largest AI model. A non-profit becomes a for-profit without anyone caring about it.
• Meta cautiously played with LLM by releasing Galactica, a foundational model for research papers, which Twitter mob lynched over made-up concerns. Already reeling from the 2016 backlash over lack of safety, Mark relented too soon.

Second Act- When AI Shook Earth

• But then OpenAI came and converted AI into an API, with one model to rule them all. Along this grand vision came the disregard of hallucination, testing, or AI safety, because it was cleverly called a research preview. Like a warning on cigarette packs giving all the plausible deniability it needs!
• It was a craze unparalleled since Apple introduced the personal computer with a GUI and brought computers from mainframe to Main Street, setting up a capital glut in VC for GenAI products like the internet boom of dot-com. Finally, the decade-long bold vision of Uncle Sam paid off. He took the risk when every other expert in AI considered AGI as a fad.
• Suddenly, everyone was an AI expert, from ‘desperate housewives’ to share crypto gossip, to husbands to cook dinner that reads good, to school kids to cheat on essays so that they can spend more time on making Tik-Tok reels and teachers to grade those essays so that they can watch those Tik-Tok reels, and overpaid execs to make their power-points and managers to improve their efficiency of copy-pasting annual appraisal reports. Groups were created as if it’s human, with everyone proudly sharing how they are cheating using ChatGPT in cocktail parties!
• OpenAI saw a 1000x jump in validation to $100B, 10x in less than a year. And VCs and MNCs, driven by FOMO pumped half a trillion dollars into this “GenAI” juggernaut, more money than all NASA’s space programs combined!
• Uncle Sam now replaced hoodies with suits & ties and went to the White House to lecture on the future of humanity. Sam tweeted “Life Is Good”
• The bald genius at Microsoft played his cards fast and brought the biggest buck. The valuation soared overnight like an orchid bloom. They must have used warrants to monopolize and launched blitzkrieg to do what he had been waiting for two decades — get over Google in the search business and over AWS in Compute. Two birds with one API, …Old rivalries die hard!

But then came a plot twist —

• The wounded tiger Mark Zuckerberg saw a chance to reinvent himself and his company from the Metaverse fiasco. He reoriented the whole AI infrastructure overnight and launched his LLM, and to the world’s shock, released it as an open-source tool with a vision. Meta could have made a lot of money, but it chose to redeem itself and Llama became the darling of AI developers around the world.
• On the other side of the Atlantic, the wonderboy in HuggingFace with Ed Sheran smile, took it personally to open-source everything in AI. He did it at a speed that investors in OpenAI frowned upon. Suddenly, many could see that the sand was shifting.
• OpenAI is not the only game in town for enterprises, and what they imagined it to be— will OpenAI become another Netscape?
• Suddenly, talk of AI safety was brought up as an existential issue that only large companies can deal with. Was that a Coventry conundrum created as a scare tactic to keep the monopoly over large models?
• But then one idealist professor, Yann LeCunn went into the battle as a one-man army, globe-trotting with his big spectacles trying to put some sense into the fear-mongering lobby; even taking on other fellows “God-Fathers of AI”. He went globe-trotting to convince the world that Open Source AI is not the threat but the biggest tool to make AI safe. (I honestly think he should play himself in any movie made on AI-wars as no one can capture his efficacious smile on screen.)
• And so with a strong push, slowly the tide started turning, and sense prevailed. Folks regulating it started to pay heed that Open-source AI is will be making the world better by ensuring competition & innovation.
• While all this going on someone at Google was punching the boxing bag madly because they didn’t know how to get outside of the maze and couldn’t figure out how to get his moat back. Rat is still searching for a way out of the maze.
• While on the sidelines, one guy in NVIDIA is sitting by his fireplace, sipping 150-year-old scotch in his leather jacket, watching all the AI wars, and smiling gently since he won the biggest buck without even getting in the ring. He cut deals with companies giving him a 10% stake because they were so desperate to get GPUs and no matter who wins the gold rush, his shovels business is going to do well!
• Despite raising $10B earlier this year, OpenAI now wanted to go back to road asking another $13B at whopping valuations of $96B, having already completed buyback at $86B and new AI researchers are offered $10M salaries. They want to build enough compute to take humanity to Alpha Centauri, except that they will just build Baby AGI. Despite idealist murmurs, there is still a long waiting list of folks desperate to get access to GPT4, so everyone thinks this round will also go smoothly. The next target is set to make a $1T company.

However, another plot twist is here-

Third Act- The Midnight Coup

• The folks at the non-profit who Uncle Sam left behind, plot a coup. They suddenly wake up to the fact that we are here for the greater good of humanity and not for capitalist greed. The knives come out in the next board meeting at OpenAI and Ceser is down, under the pretext of preserving democratic values and virtues. The board want to take no chances and takes care of Mike Antony at the same time as well.
• Who was behind the coup? Was it Ilya’s revenge or a hostile takeover by a majority investor or some minority investor flexing his power? That’s coming in Season of “AI Wars”

My reaction & prediction:

I deeply admire Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of OpenAI (despite my personal views that strongly believe open-source AI is better). They represents the best of the American Spirit, the ingenuity that combines risk-taking, bold vision, an elegant design and a transformative impact on humanity. He set-up a company with a decade long-vision and led with a flawless execution, a rarity in this era when corporate strategies are changed like Tik-Tok reels.

Sam will have a second inning just as Steve Jobs did. After all, don’t forget that Steve Jobs was also fired from Apple at one point in time! And this time Steve Woz (Greg B) is also with him.

Stay tuned for the Part2 !

That’s all you need to know this week. Keep Generating new ideas with Generative AI …..

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