The tech world is intrigued by a recently leaked memo by one of Google’s Senior Software Engineers, Luke Sernau.

In the memo, Sernau admitted that Google is fighting a losing battle in the AI space. Surprisingly, however, this admission did not pertain to their big tech rival, OpenAI. 

“While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch… I’m talking, of course, about open source,” said Sernau.

Open-source artificial intelligence is a type of AI technology shared freely and openly with the public, allowing anyone to access and use it. This open collaboration encourages developers to collaborate and share their insights to create innovative solutions.

In contrast, both Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI own their respective AI technologies. Both these technologies are closed-source and proprietary, meaning they have complete control over their AI technology, who can access it and what they can do with it.

Sernau explains that this happened after Meta’s large language model, LLaMA, got leaked online, resulting in several coders and software engineers tinkering with the large language model. This solved a problem many big tech companies face with their AI tech: scaling and quickly implementing global iterations to their models.

“The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening and a beefy laptop,” Sernau said in the leaked Google memo. “In terms of engineer-hours, the pace of improvement from these models vastly outstrips what we can do with our largest variants, and the best are already largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT.”

Currently, their large language models with 540 billion parameters have become a liability since “data quality scales better than data size.” The open-source community has been training on small, high-quality data sets that allow for better fine-tuning and eliminating the need to start from scratch when training their AI.

To solve this growing problem, Sernau pointed to Google’s past strategic decisions in two of their most successful products today: Android and Chrome. Both these platforms are released on an open-source basis, helping Google establish itself as a thought leader in these spaces. Sernau suggests Google do the same with their AI models, even if it “means taking some uncomfortable steps, like publishing the model weights for small ULM variants.”

Whether or not open-source (and not OpenAI) is Google’s biggest rival is debatable. However, this leaked Google memo offers a new perspective on how we should expect the AI space to evolve. Would this mean a pivot towards open-source domination for Google? Or would they continue developing their existing AI products in a closed system?

Disclaimer: This leaked Google memo is only the opinion of one of Google’s Senior Engineers and does not reflect the company’s official stance.

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