dean guadagni

“Inside the A.I. Arms Race That Changed Silicon Valley Forever” is basically the NY Times flexing on how to do journalism right. The amount of insider stories packed into one article is mind-blowing. This reads like the next edition of Genius Makers by @CadeMetz (who was one of four bylined authors on the piece). Some of the highlights that caught my attention: > “Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, had decided to ready a slate of products based on artificial intelligence — immediately. He turned to Mr. Walker, the same lawyer he was trusting to defend the company in a profit-threatening antitrust case in Washington, D.C. Mr. Walker knew he would need to persuade the Advanced Technology Review Council, as Google called the group of executives, to throw off their customary caution and do as they were told. It was an edict, and edicts didn’t happen very often at Google. But Google was staring at a real crisis. Its business model was potentially at risk.” > "In mid-November 2022, Mr. Altman; Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president; and others met in a top-floor conference room to discuss the problems with their breakthrough tech yet again. Suddenly Mr. Altman made the decision — they would release the old, less-powerful technology. The plan was to call it Chat with GPT 3.5 and put it out by the end of the month. They referred to it as a “low key research preview.” It didn’t feel like a big-deal decision to anyone in the room." > On Nov. 29, the night before the launch, Mr. Brockman hosted drinks for the team. He didn’t think ChatGPT would attract a lot of attention, he said. His prediction: “no more than one tweet thread with 5k likes.” > "As they waited in line for lunch at a cafe in Meta’s Frank Gehry-designed headquarters, Dr. LeCun delivered a warning to Mr. Zuckerberg. He said Meta should match OpenAI’s technology and also push forward with work on an A.I. assistant that could do stuff on the internet on your behalf. Websites like Facebook and Instagram could become extinct, he warned. A.I. was the future. Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t say much, but he was listening." > "A year later, Mr. Nadella got a peek at what would become GPT-4. Mr. Nadella asked it to translate a poem written in Persian by Rumi, who died in 1273, into Urdu. It did. He asked it to transliterate the Urdu into English characters. It did that, too. “Then I said, ‘God, this thing,’” Mr. Nadella recalled in an interview. From that moment, he was all in. Microsoft’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI had already grown to $3 billion. Now Microsoft was planning to increase that to $10 billion."