Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World

by Parmy Olson

There was nothing unusual about Google sharing some of the foundational mechanics of an invention with the world. That was often how tech companies operated. When they “open-sourced” new techniques, they got feedback from the research community, which boosted their reputation among top engineers, making it easier to hire them. But Google underestimated how much that would cost the company. Of the eight researchers who invented the transformer, all have now left Google. Most started their own AI companies, which at the time of writing were worth more than $4 billion in aggregate. Character.ai alone was worth $1 billion and has become one of the world’s most popular chatbot sites. Shazeer sees himself going into the stratosphere with the innovation that Google didn’t properly exploit: “Search is like a trillion-dollar technology but a trillion dollars isn’t cool,” he says today from his office in Menlo Park, California. “You know what’s cool? A quadrillion dollars. This is a quadrillion-dollar technology because where search was about making information universally accessible, AI is about making intelligence universally accessible and making everyone massively more productive.”