🤖 Exciting duel between Google and OpenAI with pre-Christmas AI launches
💪 Sam Altman withstands Sundar Pichai's offensive with improvements to ChatGPT and tries not to be outpaced by Microsoft's moves with Anthropic and Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg's dealings with Trump
OpenAI and Google have given us tasks for these holiday days, leaving us with new tools and applications in Artificial Intelligence this week. The competition between OpenAI and Google at the end of the year is dizzying: when OpenAI launches Sora, Google responds with Veo2 and Whisk. When OpenAI makes ChatGPT Search accessible to all users, Google announces that in early 2025 there will be news about the new way to interact with search engines in this transition from traditional internet search to conversational querying with chatbots. When OpenAI introduces projects as a new way to organize chats, Google counterattacks with Code Assist in Gemini 2.0 for programmers. And when OpenAI includes Santa in the voice mode of ChatGPT for these holidays, Google improves NotebookLM and launches a powerful payment option. The duel is thrilling.
If this December we had to highlight two companies for their innovations, they would undoubtedly be OpenAI and Google. The fight between the teams of Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai is intense until the last minute of 2024. In the field of video generation, to Altman's despair, reviews from the lucky ones who have been able to test both tools indicate that Google's Veo2 surpasses the competition. Sora, after 10 months of waiting, seems to cause despair. However, I still believe that Sora will significantly contribute to the popularization of video as a common format for AI-generated content.
It must be acknowledged that OpenAI's daily releases are addictive, although they begin to exasperate divulgators, analysts, and AI informers. Sam Altman's persistence is helping to turn the page after the loss of talent in the company, but it might not act as a smokescreen against Elon Musk's and Meta's offensive to make OpenAI cease being a nonprofit organization so easily. The publication of Musk's emails from the early days of OpenAI by Altman as a response to the lawsuit from Donald Trump's billionaire friend against the ChatGPT company must have some justification that is hard to understand from 6,000 kilometers away. If Musk influences Trump, and if figures like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have made donations for the Republican president's inauguration, spreading Musk's emails and the tension generated does not seem like the best strategy for OpenAI at this politically delicate moment.
To complicate things further for Altman, Microsoft, which invested in OpenAI when it needed it most, is considering investing in Claude from Anthropic. But this would be incompatible with the new policy of OpenAI designed by Altman for a stage of unabashed profit. I am not sure if Altman can afford to do without Microsoft and the support of Satya Nadella, which was crucial just a year ago when he was fired. Although Microsoft also has an alliance with French Mistral AI in Europe and could partner with Anthropic, the incompatibilities imposed by Altman seem counterproductive. Time will tell.
Next week on Transparent Algorithm, we will have a very interesting interview. I hope that for the first newsletter of 2025 we can count on technological and AI predictions for the next year. I wish you happy holidays.