Another type of alignment

The race is on

On December 6 Google announced Gemini with its multimodal characteristics - the ability to combine image, text, voice, and video. They published an impressive conceptual demo (check this linked YouTube video, it is definitively worth a million words). Although response times have been abbreviated and edited, they show the direction we are heading into. It was encouraging to see safety and ethics as featured as part of their corporate announcement. While we should approach it with a grain of salt, it is a start.

This follows the AI Alliance announcement by IBM, Meta, Hugging Face, and more than 50 companies and institutions earlier this week. They are taking an alternative approach towards a truly open AI.

The contours of this battleground are now clearer. Microsoft + OpenAI and AWS + Anthropic complete the large four corporate players in the field and startups like Cohere run on the side in the race to capture enterprise clients.

Who will win? Innovation and acceleration are clearly in the front.