Google was warned by one of its employees that they could lose the artificial intelligence (AI) race. But according to the employee, Google's main enemy is not OpenAI which is the developer of ChatGPT.
This warning appears in a document written by a Google engineer and leaked on the internet. In the document, the unnamed engineer said Google was "looking over our shoulder" a lot at OpenAI.
However, the employee who is a senior software engineer said that currently the competition in the AI world is not being led by Google or OpenAI. He also mentions that Google's AI model has no 'special ingredients'.
"The inconvenient truth is, we are not positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI," said the Google engineer, as quoted by The Guardian, Monday (8/5/2023).
"While we were competing, the third faction was secretly taking our lunch," he continued.
The third faction that the engineer refers to as opposed to Google and OpenAI is the open-source community. Open-source technologies are usually released for anyone to use, improve, and adapt as they see fit.
The Google engineer said open-source AI developers are currently outpacing Google's work. He gave an example since the large language model LLaMA made by Meta is available so that anyone can develop AI models.
The document also cites a number of websites equipped with open-source AI models that can create visual masterpieces. Unlike ChatGPT and Google Bard chatbot which do not make their AI model publicly available.
"While our model is still slightly ahead in terms of quality, the gap is starting to close very quickly. The open-source model is faster, more customizable and more capable," he said.