🥟 Chao-Down #79 Leaked Google memo says the company "has no moat" in AI, Khan Academy launches personal AI tutor

Is there a true competitive advantage in the fast-paced world of AI development?

An anonymous Google researcher just leaked a memo saying that the company “has no moat” in AI, but neither does OpenAI or any of the other tech giants.

While mainstream media has painted the AI wars as a battle amongst the hyperscalers that have the infrastructure, data, and research talent to build large generative AI models, a real force in this race is the rise of open-source.

A truly global community featuring anyone from hobbyists to research scientists, the AI/ML open-source community has already shown its ability to produce state-of-the-art AI models that can compete with anything released by Google, Microsoft, Meta, and the other big-tech firms.

The memo is a fascinating read on the internal thinking that I’m sure many people working in AI share — that the value lies not on the strength of any one model, but the ability to tap into the global mindshare of human intelligence.

For a deeper breakdown into the report, check out my video reaction to it. 

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Google shared AI knowledge with the world - until ChatGPT caught up (The Washington Post)

Learning nonprofit Khan Academy thinks AI has a big place in education (Fast Company)

Slack updates aim to put AI at the center of the user experience (TechCrunch)

Google working to bring Bard AI to Pixel phones as a widget (9to5google.com)

White House Unveils Initiatives to Reduce Risks of AI (The New York Times)

Hugging Face and ServiceNow open up generative AI for coding with StarCoder (VentureBeat)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics (pimbook.org)

RLHF: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (huyenchip.com)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

deepdoctection is a Python library that orchestrates document extraction and document layout analysis tasks using deep learning models. (Github)

Arize-ai/phoenix: ML Observability in a Notebook - Uncover Insights, Surface Problems, Monitor, and Fine Tune your Generative LLM, CV and Tabular Models (Github)

gmpetrov/databerry: The no-code platform for connecting custom data to large language models (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

Unlimiformer: Long-Range Transformers with Unlimited Length Input (arxiv)

Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation. (Github)

Expressive Text-to-Image Generation with Rich Text (rich-text-to-image.github.io)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Apple and Google Aim to Stop Unwanted Tracking by AirTags, Other Devices - CNET

Michael J. Fox Foundation Announces Significant Breakthrough in Search for Parkinson's Biomarker | Parkinson's Disease (michaeljfox.org)

Chess is booming among teens. Here’s why - (Polygon)

Amazon Launches TikTok Competitor Inspire for Influencers and Shoppers (Insider)

One Last Bite 😋