Google's AI Shock and Awe Campaign

Plus Ilya leaves OpenAI

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
May 15, 2024

The AI Daily Brief First Five - Wednesday May 15, 2024

Editor’s Note: One more slightly non traditional format as we reflect on Google’s announcement and Ilya’s leaving OpenAI.

First, Google bit back yesterday.

It's clear now why OpenAI felt they needed to get their Spring Update ahead of Google I/O. Google went for a "shock and awe" strategy announcing a huge number of AI products and updates.

The watchword for the whole presentation was "integration." More than ever, Google's AI is in every single Google product. Google isn't just grafting AI on to their existing products (which was what we saw last year from Google), they're updating their products with generative AI as the center of the product experience. This was particularly apparent in the integrations with Gmail, Search and AI Teammate for Google Workspace.

One thing that was shared between OpenAI's presentation and Google's presentation was the nudging towards an AI agent powered future. In many ways, the new features and products like GPT-4o and Project Astra are all retraining users on the types of human-computer interactions that will get them prepared for true agent experiences

By and large, the AI twittersphere was impressed with the announcements at Google. If there was a caveat with regard to Google's AI assistant tools like Project Astra, it's that there weren't live demos — Google presented pre-recorded videos. After they oversold Gemini Ultra last December, skepticism is higher.

Indeed for the technically-minded Twitter AI community participants, OpenAI still came out ahead of this exchange. A poll from Stanford's Andrew Gao asking "who wins AI today" had OpenAI at 60.5% vs Google's 16.3%. Jenny AI from Microsoft asked "So who won the week" with OpenAI hitting 85.8% to Google's 14.2%.

Still, the sheer quantity of announcements meant that most people weren't comparing whose AI assistant was the most state of the art. Even more than that, it's clear from I/O that Google isn't going after the AI Twitter community — they're going after the mass market of future potential AI users.

In that pursuit, they’re definitely ready to compete.

**

Six months after the board debacle, what most people suspected has come to pass and Ilya Sustkever has left OpenAI.

In fact, many people think the timing (6 months) wasn’t coincidental at all, and might have been pre-planned as part of the resolution of the crisis last November.

Adding more questions, OpenAI’s head of superalignment Jan Leike also announced his departure in an incredibly terse Tweet with none of the normal corporate niceties.

Seems like more story to come…

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