12/6/2023: Google Announces Gemini
Google finally announced its multimodal Gemini model today to compete with ChatGPT. The demos look really cool but it’s not really available for the public to try. I tried Bard this morning and didn’t feel it got any smarter. The good news is developers can access Gemini through Google Cloud's API starting December 13th. I suppose we will know better by then. The AI race is getting really intense now. I believe the end users will be the biggest winner while OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple battle one another out. Throughout history, technology has changed humanity through electricity, tap water, vaccines, cars, air travel, internet, mobile phones and many other great inventions. Artificial intelligence is going to be one of those great inventions and I believe it will be a big net positive through open competition. I might write a long essay to argue why the AGI risk is most likely over-exaggerated but let me just say intelligence is overrated by intellectuals. This world will probably run better without many intellectuals’ excessive pontification. (I am guilty ;-). ) Like what the great Nassim Taleb said, birds can fly without knowing how flying works. Over-intellectualization is often a bug not a feature. A machine with intelligence is nice but it cannot replace humans in many aspects. In a way, a machine with intelligence will be similar to a machine with great physical strength invented a couple hundreds years ago. These machines didn’t dominate humanity. Plus, if we really want to fear something, we should fear more about gene editing or lab created viruses than AGI at the moment. Just look at the damages the COVID-19 pandemic caused.