FOD#53a: Google’s moat against OpenAI + See you at Microsoft Build

Google I/O, OpenAI drama, Microsoft Build + the best curated list of research papers and other reads

Wow. This week is going to be hot! I’m in Seattle right now to cover Microsoft Build and bring you insights from Kevin Scott, Microsoft's CTO.

Since it's all very exciting and reportage is a completely different thing than just a pure analysis based on 150+ newsletters and media well-read, we are changing our usual schedule. This week, you will receive two FODs:

• Today, on Monday, we will cover the news from Google I/O and their moat against OpenAI.
• Tomorrow, on Tuesday, fresh and hot, right after our conversation with Kevin Scott, we will send you what caught our attention from Microsoft's announcements (they already announced Surface Pro 11, Surface Laptop 7, and Copilot+ PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite – but there is more to come!)

Are you also in Seattle? Let me know, maybe we can catch up for a coffee.

Google’s moat against OpenAI?

Last week saw two big tech events: the OpenAI Spring updates and Google I/O. We covered OpenAI’s impressive presentation of GPT-4o and thought OpenAI would “rest on their laurels,” but by the end of the week, a few notable resignations occurred. Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, and Evan Morikawa left the company. When many scientific personnel depart, it often indicates a shift in favor of product-oriented priorities, which is concerning, considering OpenAI’s goal to achieve not-fully specified AGI. It’s sad that while delivering so much, they are also notable for frequent drama and reactive damage control.

This brings us to Google. After their updates last week during Google I/O, some observers noted that Google, which hasn't partnered with any foundation model builders (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.), is catching up quickly. Considering the turmoil at OpenAI, it’s safe to say that Google’s moat – initially perceived as a disadvantage – lies in their size and history. Google is a large, established tech company with diversified revenue streams, demonstrating financial stability and consistent growth. It’s basically drama-free. Sundar Pichai is well-paced and plays a very long-term game. He and Google might seem to move slower at first, but they have tremendous ML talent, developed infrastructure, and business applications for their AI. Google's steady, methodical approach could prove to be more resilient in the long run.

But, there are different opinions as well. Stratechery argues that weaknesses emerge in Google's innovation pipeline outside its core competencies. The disappointment highlighted during the Google I/O keynote, for instance, stems from what appears to be a series of underdeveloped new products that do not yet match the transformative impact of its existing technologies. Additionally, many of Google's ambitious projects, such as AI Agents and Project Astra, are still at a conceptual stage without immediate practical applications, leading to perceptions of them as vaporware. These initiatives show potential but also reveal a gap between Google's visionary presentations and their current practical implementations. This gap may affect Google's ability to maintain its innovative edge against rapidly evolving competitors in the AI space.

Google I/O 2024 was, of course, a showcase of the company's deepening commitment to AI. Here are highlights:

Gemini Enhancements & Integrations:

• Google's Gemini model was taking center stage. An incredible upgrade is the doubling of Gemini 1.5 Pro's context window from 1 million to 2 million tokens, enhancing its ability to understand and respond to complex queries.
• Google's latest language model is not only getting faster and more capable but is also being integrated across various Google products (such as Gmail, Drive, Docs, etc).?

Generative AI Innovations:

• Beyond Gemini, Google introduced PaliGemma, a powerful open vision-language model inspired by PaLI-3. PaliGemma combines the SigLIP vision model and Gemma language model for class-leading performance in tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and object detection.
• And unveiled Gemma 2, a next-generation AI model with 27 billion parameters, offering class-leading performance at half the size of comparable models like Llama 3 70B.
• And set a waitlist for Imagen-3, their highest quality text-to-image model.
• Google also presented Project Astra, an ambitious endeavor to create a multimodal AI assistant that “can process multimodal information, understand the context you're in, and respond naturally in conversation.”
• Another notable reveal was Veo, a GenAI model capable of producing 1080p videos from text, image, or video prompts, opening new creative possibilities. ElevenLabs immediately gave it a try:?

• Firebase Genkit was introduced to help developers build AI-powered applications more efficiently.

Search & Information Access Improvements

• Very cool feature: “Ask Photos”, powered by Gemini, enables users to query their photo libraries conversationally.
• Google Chrome is also getting smarter with the integration of Gemini Nano, facilitating text generation within the browser.
• Google Search is receiving an AI overhaul with "AI Overviews," summarizing information from the web, and a new "Circle to Search" feature for solving math problems.
• Finally, Google's SynthID, an AI watermarking tool, is being upgraded to detect AI-generated videos and images.
• Google Lens received a significant upgrade, allowing users to search using video recordings.?

Hardware

• Everybody tries to announce something about compute. At Google I/O 2024, Google unveiled Trillium, its sixth-generation TPU, offering a 4.7x increase in compute performance per chip, double the HBM and ICI bandwidth, and 67% greater energy efficiency. Featuring third-generation SparseCore, Trillium supports large-scale AI models like Gemini 1.5 Flash and Imagen 3. These TPUs can scale to hundreds of pods, forming supercomputers, and enhance AI workloads, supporting frameworks like JAX and PyTorch/XLA.

Overall, Google I/O 2024 underscored the company's focus on making AI more accessible, powerful, and integrated into everyday tools and experiences. The event set the stage for a future where AI plays an even more significant role in how we interact with technology and information.

Google I/O Keynote:

Twitter Library

News from The Usual Suspects ?

Microsoft’s turn to shine

• Microsoft Build kicks off tomorrow, May 21-23, but they has already announced Surface Pro 11, Surface Laptop 7, and Copilot+ PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite. These processors are expected to boost AI performance, potentially surpassing the M3 MacBook Air. New Copilot features include Recall search for comprehensive file history retrieval, Cocreator for image generation, and AI-generated in-game hints for Xbox Game Pass.
• Stay tuned for tomorrow!

Hugging Face’s cool launches

• HF introduced ZeroGPU – a significant step forward in democratizing AI technology by providing shared GPU infrastructure. Independent and academic AI developers often lack the resources available to big tech companies. ZeroGPU allows users to run AI demos efficiently on shared GPUs without bearing high compute costs, offering $10M of free GPUs to support this initiative. The infrastructure uses Nvidia A100 GPU devices and operates more energy-efficiently by dynamically allocating GPU resources, which can host multiple spaces simultaneously.
• HF launched Transformers Agents 2.0, an updated framework for creating agents that solve complex tasks by iterating based on past observations.

Some good news from OpenAI

In other newsletters:

• What are KANs, how are they trained, and what makes them so powerful? By Daily Dose of Data Science
• Thoughts in guaranteed safety by Import AI (Jack Clark)
• A curated set of recent open LLMs, datasets and more by Interconnects (Nathan Lambert)
• a16z loves AI by CBinsights

BTW, you might also like this episode about ImageNet. Read it here, It’s free

The freshest research papers were published. We categorized for your convenience ????