Google’s Missed AI Opportunity

Google’s oversight of the Transformer paper in 2017 cost them a staggering $6.2 billion – a combined valuation of the AI startups built by the researchers of the pivotal paper.

“No one knows my face or my name, but it takes five seconds to explain: ‘I was on the team that created the ‘T’ in ChatGPT’,” said Llion Jones, the last of the eight authors of the Transformer paper, titled ‘Attention Is All You Need’, who (also) left Google to start his own company – Sakana AI, alongside former Google research scientist David Ha.?

Other notable companies founded by Transformer authors – include Cohere, Adept, and Character.AI among others. Cohere was founded in 2019 by Aidan N Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, which has now soared to a valuation of $2.2 billion. Started last year, Adept was founded by lead author Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar and is worth over $1 billion. Noam Shazeer, another author of the transformative paper, co-founded Character.AI, a chatbot startup, in 2021 that rose to a valuation of $1 billion.?

Illia Polosukhin founded the high-performance blockchain called ‘NEAR Protocol’, in 2017, which is valued at $2 billion. Jakob Uszkoreit who thought of the name Transformer founded Inceptive in 2021 to use deep learning and learn life’s languages. Lukasz Kaiser, one of the authors of the paper, left Google two years ago and found his place as a member of the technical staff at OpenAI.?

Read the full story here.

Can Gemini Save Google?

Google wanted to win the generative AI race against OpenAI and Microsoft so badly, that it temporarily put on hold its grudges with DeepMind, and started working on their next-generation project called Gemini. The project is expected to be released sometime in the coming months. Led by Jeff Dean, the head of Google Brain, and Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, the team is confident that Gemini will eclipse OpenAI’s GPT-4, but is that really possible?

To top it all, a recent report by SemiAnalysis, also stated that Google is the most compute-rich firm in the world and its Gemini is unbeatable. Sadly, the GPU-rich vs GPU-poor conversation was not taken seriously by anyone, and only time will tell if Gemini is worth all the hype.?

Check out the fate of Google’s Gemini project here.

Google Cloud Tames Llama & Falcon?

At the recent Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco, Google surprised everyone by announcing that they’re offering Llama 2 as well as Falcon LLM on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. This was unexpected because Google was the only cloud service provider that hadn’t partnered with rival institutions to host Llama 2 or any other open-source LLM models before this.?

It looks like this decision by Google has been taken keeping enterprises in mind who are the staple customers for Vertex AI but are looking for more options. If we go by the trend, after GPT-4, Llama 2 is the most sought-after large language model, considering it is open-sourced and commercially available. In the case of Llama 2, Google said that it is the only cloud provider offering both adapter tuning and RLHF.

Read the complete story here.

India's Call to IBM

IBM chief Arvind Krishna recently said that India should build sovereign capability in AI. He wants the government to push for more transparent and open AI policies when it comes to enabling companies to build and leverage AI within the country. With the policies and incentives, the private sector might be ready to take the risk to experiment with the expensive technology.?

Citing the success of Chandrayaan-3 and the rising AI capabilities of the US, China, UAE, and many European countries, Krishna said that the Indian government can help speed up the process by boosting the confidence of the private sector.?

All of this definitely makes sense, but what is stopping IBM itself from stepping up its game in India and making an Indian AI hub? Read more here.