Finally, some excitement in tech
This week, Google launched Gemini, the long-awaited answer from Google to OpenAI's GPT product suite. The keyword repeated in all the marketing material is 'multimodality' alluding to its ability to seamlessly interact with text, images, video, audio and programming code. This claim was accompanied by a (highly scripted) video called Hands-on with Gemini (if you can spare 6 minutes, it is highly entertaining) showing current and future possibilities nicely mixed together. As you can imagine, the Internet lit up with criticism that the whole thing is not real and Google is desperately trying to show something for the billions of dollars spent on its R&D. Sore losers.
Google, as an acknowledgment of its existence, compared the new Gemini model with GPT-4 and showed that it exceeded GPT-4 in all but one metric. But the margin is not as big as one would expect.
Not to be outdone and far from the media spotlight, Amazon's cloud division AWS, during its annual conference, re:Invent, announced numerous enhancements to its own offerings. To name a few: Amazon Q, the AI Chatbot, improvements to its machine learning stack, and new features to its storage offerings for better integration with all things AI. I know to the non-technical person it doesn't sound too amazing, but for all the companies thinking about building something new and exciting, these could provide an easier path to experiment and create.
The exciting part in all this is that the small startup (OpenAI) was able to poke companies like Google and Amazon to start (again) focusing on actual innovation and not just incremental improvements for their offerings. Google, for once, has a major problem. Its search and marketing engine is the main contributor to its revenue and profit. All the other ventures are just nice to have. True, we are still talking billions but compared to the ad business, not that special. Google will keep working hard to build its future, new revenue stream.
To keep things in perspective, OpenAI - regardless how popular it is in the media - is still a startup with one product and it is still trying to figure out what to do with it. It did the licensing deal with Microsoft in exchange for billions of dollars of investment and equity. It is also trying to get into the App Store marketplace business. After a while, the startup phase will be more obvious and a difficult road lies ahead for OpenAI. Despite the strong early start, OpenAI is missing the gigantic infrastructure of Google, AWS and let's not forget Meta (Facebook) or Apple. Plus, all of these companies are highly profitable.
Out of all this, the best part is that anyone has access to this new, exciting technology and can start experimenting and unleashing their imagination. The land of never-ending possibilities just got bigger. Make it your own recurrent pattern and build something amazing.