We're At a Fork in the Road for AI Development

In 2014, Google announced its $500 million dollar acquisition of DeepMind, a London-based AI research startup as part of ongoing efforts to invest in the then-incipient Machine Learning market, fueled by the ever-increasing availability of powerful compute as dictated by Moore’s Law. Just a year later, in 2015, a joint partnership between some of the most high-profile investors in Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, produced OpenAI, a fledgling AI lab that would eventually partner with Microsoft in 2019 and introduce LLM-based chatbots to the general public. Finally, Amazon, after a few long years of avoiding the so-called AI race between the various tech powerhouses, decided to form a strategic alliance with the AI development company and AI Ethics research lab Anthropic by means of a $4 billion dollar investment and compute partnership.

For the first few years of the labs ...