Chris' Take Away



+ The uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI.
+ While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.
+ I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. 
 
**Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today. Just to name a few:**

● LLMs on a Phone: People are running foundation models on a Pixel 6 at 5 tokens / sec.
● Scalable Personal AI: You can finetune a personalized AI on your laptop in an evening.
● Responsible Release: This one isn’t “solved” so much as “obviated”. There are entire
websites full of art models with no restrictions whatsoever, and text is not far behind.
● Multimodality: The current multimodal ScienceQA SOTA was trained in an hour.
While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly
quickly. Open source models are faster, more customizable, more private, an

+ This recent progress has direct, immediate implications for our business strategy. 
+ Who would pay for a Google product with usage restrictions if there is a free, high quality alternative without them?
+ And we should not expect to be able to catch up. 
+ The modern internet runs on open source for a reason. Open source has some significant advantages that we cannot replicate

+ Keeping our technology secret was always a tenuous proposition.           
  + Google researchers are leaving for other companies on a regular cadence, so we can assume they know everything we know, and will continue to for as long as that pipeline is open

+ Much of this innovation is happening on top of the leaked model weights from Meta. 
+ While this will inevitably change as truly open models get better, the point is that they don’t have to wait.
+ The legal cover afforded by “personal use” and the impracticality of prosecuting individuals means that individuals are getting access to these technologies while they are hot.

**What about OpenAI?**

+ And in the end, OpenAI doesn’t matter. They are making the same mistakes we are in their posture relative to open source, and their ability to maintain an edge is necessarily in question.
+ Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance. 
+ In this respect, at least, we can make the first move.

**CHRIS NOTE**

March 3, 2023 - The Inevitable Happens

Within a week, LLaMA is leaked to the public. The impact on the community cannot be overstated. Existing licenses prevent it from being used for commercial purposes, but suddenly anyone is able to experiment. 

From this point forward, innovations come hard and fast