Well the race is on. Companies and Nations are racing to AGI. This article is collaborative edit to 1st. explain the situation simply. 2nd. Discuss which company / nation seems to be ahead and in what way.

Details Details Details

OpenAI has proved it can ship AI products relatively quickly. Its flagship model GPT4 is however now lagging behind Anthropic’s newest model Sonnet 3.5 on various benchmarks. OpenAI looks like it is focused on good customer interactions with GPT-o and its voice feature. OpenAI has the backing of microsoft and aloooooot of sweet sweet money.

Anthropic recently released the SOTA Sonnet 3.5 model. It is leading on many benchmarks. Anthropic seems to be the only company trying to understand internals. Many believe understanding the internals is required to creating safe AI. But also, one has to guess that understanding the AI will help you improve it.

Google ahead on context windows, incorporating search, and implementation on non-language datasets like math and genomics. Google obviously has a tooooooon of money, however it has a lot of bureaucracy to deal with.

Dark horses:

Facebook is doing some really cool stuff with visual AI models. If vision is really that important to building a world model, they may eventually end up ahead.

Amazon is implementing robotics at scale. It’s getting good at this. If embodiment is important, Amazon may find itself in a really good spot.

Chinese companies. It’s a little unclear how to compare Chinese AI models to American AI models. There are always allegations of stealing secrets and meddling with tests and benchmarking. I’d guess they are not as behind as most believe. There may even be areas where they are ahead - For example, graph networks, vision and deployment at scale.

Random individuals and small groups - Its a little hard to imagine an individual or small group coming up with an idea and implementing it on their own in a way so that they are competing with the major labs. BUTTTT perhaps there is a simple breakthrough that would allow such a thing to happen.