Grey hair rising in Australia’s start-up scene
Think founding a start-up is for a couple of software-obsessed university mates or a 21-year-old borrowing $12,000 from her boyfriend’s dad? Think again
The New Big Tech
The Atlantic [read free] – “A slate of four AI companies might soon rule Silicon Valley…Chatbots and their ilk are still in their early stages, but everything in the world of AI is already converging around just four companies. You could refer to them by the acronym GOMA: Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic. Shortly after OpenAI releasedChatGPT last year, Microsoft poured $10 billion into the start-up and shoved OpenAI-based chatbots into its search engine, Bing. Not to be outdone, Google announced that more AI features were coming to Search, Maps, Docs, and more, and introduced Bard, its own rival chatbot. Microsoft and Google are now in a race to integrate generative AI into just about everything. Meanwhile, Anthropic, a start-up launched by former OpenAI employees, has raised billions of dollars in its own right, including from Google. Companies such as Slack, Expedia, Khan Academy, Salesforce, and Bain are integrating ChatGPT into their products; many others are using Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude. Executives from GOMA have also met with leaders and officials around the world to shape the future of AI’s deployment and regulation. The four have overlapping but separate proposals for AI safety and regulation, but they have joined together to create the Frontier Model Forum, a consortium whose stated mission is to protect against the supposed world-ending dangers posed by terrifyingly capable models that do not yet exist but, it warns, are right around the corner. That existential language—about bioweapons and nuclearrobots—has since migrated its way into all sorts of government proposals andlanguage. If AI is truly reshaping the world, these companies are the sculptors…”
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