What Wall? AI Wars Continue To Heat Up

If you’ve been following the AI chatter recently, you’ve probably heard claims and opposition that AI development has hit a wall. "There is no wall," OpenAI’s Sam Altman asserted on X, formerly Twitter, last month, sparking a fierce debate across the tech community.

Is AI progress slowing, or is this just noise? Let’s unpack it.

The ‘Wall’ Debate: Who’s Saying What?

The "wall" debate has drawn sharp opinions from leaders in the AI field. Altman has flat-out rejected the idea of stagnation. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are also firmly in the "no wall" camp. 

On the other side of the argument, Marc Andreessen believes that AI models are hitting a ceiling, with performance leveling out across the board. Adding nuance to the discussion, Ilya Sutskever, cofounder of OpenAI, has noted that scaling pretraining results have plateaued.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s CTO, Kevin Scott, dismissed the slowdown concerns, stating that we’re far from reaching diminishing returns.

Reports from leading media publications suggest that top players like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic might be running into diminishing returns as they attempt to scale up their flagship models.

New Models Dropping Like Hotcakes

While the debates rage on, companies aren’t slowing down their launches. Here’s what’s new:

Meta: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has dropped Llama 3.3, a 70B open model that’s cheaper (~25x less than GPT-4o) and faster, though it’s text-only for now. Meta’s VP of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, shared a chart showcasing the model's performance advantages over competitors like Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and Amazon’s Nova Pro across multiple benchmarks, including MMLU.

Google: Spearheaded by Sundar Pichai, the company celebrated Gemini’s first birthday with Gemini-exp-1206, a model that now tops the Chatbot Arena rankings across all domains. And yes, it’s free to use in AI Studio.

OpenAI: During their "12 Days of OpenAI" event this week, OpenAI launched a new ChatGPT Pro tier ($200/month) that gives you unlimited access to all models, including the advanced "o1" reasoning model and the enhanced "o1 pro mode." It also announced reinforcement finetuning which simplifies creating domain-specific expert models with minimal training data. Limited alpha is out now and public rollout comes in the first quarter of 2025.

xAI: Elon Musk’s AI startup has made Grok—their conversational AI chatbot—available to all X users (even those without a blue checkmark). Users can send 10 messages to Grok every two hours, with rumors of a standalone app coming next.

Microsoft: The Satya Nadella-led company rolled out Copilot Vision in Edge, an AI assistant that can see your browser and navigate alongside you in real time with voice commands.

Microsoft’s partnership with ChatGPT-parent OpenAI has given it a significant edge, allowing the integration of advanced AI features into its products like Azure, Office, and even Bing.

Google, however, isn’t resting on its laurels – it is leveraging its AI prowess to maintain dominance in search and advertising.

Milestones: Users And Adoption

AI adoption milestones are also worth noting. OpenAI’s weekly active users have reached 300 million, according to Sam Altman at the DealBook Summit. Meanwhile, Meta’s Llama-powered AI has nearly 600 million monthly active users, as revealed by Mark Zuckerberg.

Looking Ahead

The battle between AI startups to not just attract but also retain users is analogous to how app developers chased user growth during the early days of smartphones.

As things stand, the first-mover advantage is usually hard to overcome. This is evident from the hundreds of millions — and in some cases, billions of users — that some apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, X, and others enjoy.

Core apps like iMessage, Gmail, Safari, and Google Chrome have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of users who use them several times a day.

A similar pattern is emerging with AI chatbots, too. OpenAI took the world by storm with ChatGPT in late 2022, and there has been no looking back—its 300 million weekly active users tell the story themselves.

But will there be a disruptor? Should OpenAI be worried? Or is the pie large enough that it can be split easily between several players?

Only time will tell.

What we can say, for sure, though, is that these AI chatbots are here to stay, just like apps have become an intrinsic part of our lives now.

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