In May 2023, a memo from an unnamed Google AI engineer leaked and quickly made the rounds of the tech newsophere, racking up thousands of comments on Hacker News. The memo was titled “ We Have No Moat…And Neither Does OpenAI”. The gist of the post was this — stop focusing on building the next giant model and start working with the open source community because they will beat us in the end.

“We’ve done a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI. Who will cross the next milestone? What will the next move be? But the uncomfortable truth is we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch. I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today.“

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