Luke Sernau has been a senior software engineer at Google since March 2019, according to his LinkedIn page, and he is also the founder and CEO of BetterEngineering.org.
He is based in Seattle and wrote a message very critical of Google's strategy, which was, for a long time, a pioneer in artificial intelligence until the launch to the general public of ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot developed by OpenAI, which has changed the way search engines now work.
The engineer's message, published by semianalysis.com, has been circulating within Google since April and has now become a topic of conversation on within Silicon Valley. Sernau issues a warning: open source communities are the true rivals of Google and OpenAI. These communities are making faster progress than the two companies and are likely to beat them in the AI arms race. He therefore calls on Google to open up to the open source community to avoid becoming obsolete and a strategic fiasco.
Here are excerpts from his message.
'We Have No Moat'
"And neither does OpenAI.
"We’ve done a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI. Who will cross the next milestone? What will the next move be?
"But the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.
"I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today.
"While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable."
"We have no secret sauce. Our best hope is to learn from and collaborate with what others are doing outside Google. We should prioritize enabling 3P integrations.
"People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. We should consider where our value add really is.
"Giant models are slowing us down. In the long run, the best models are the ones which can be iterated upon quickly. We should make small variants more than an afterthought."
'What Happened'
"At the beginning of March the open source community got their hands on their first really capable foundation model, as Meta’s LLaMA was leaked to the public (...)
"A tremendous outpouring of innovation followed, with just days between major developments (...)
"Most importantly, they have solved the scaling problem to the extent that anyone can tinker. Many of the new ideas are from ordinary people. 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."
'Why We Could Have Seen It Coming'
"In many ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. The current renaissance in open source LLMs comes hot on the heels of a renaissance in image generation. The similarities are not lost on the community, with many calling this the “Stable Diffusion moment” for LLMs.
"In both cases, low-cost public involvement was enabled by a vastly cheaper mechanism for fine tuning called low rank adaptation, or LoRA, combined with a significant breakthrough in scale (latent diffusion for image synthesis, Chinchilla for LLMs). In both cases, access to a sufficiently high-quality model kicked off a flurry of ideas and iteration from individuals and institutions around the world. In both cases, this quickly outpaced the large players.
"These contributions were pivotal in the image generation space, setting Stable Diffusion on a different path from Dall-E. Having an open model led to product integrations, marketplaces, user interfaces, and innovations that didn’t happen for Dall-E.
"The effect was palpable: rapid domination in terms of cultural impact vs the OpenAI solution, which became increasingly irrelevant. Whether the same thing will happen for LLMs remains to be seen, but the broad structural elements are the same."
'What We Missed'
"The innovations that powered open source’s recent successes directly solve problems we’re still struggling with. Paying more attention to their work could help us to avoid reinventing the wheel.
"LoRA is an incredibly powerful technique we should probably be paying more attention to (...)
"Being able to personalize a language model in a few hours on consumer hardware is a big deal, particularly for aspirations that involve incorporating new and diverse knowledge in near real-time. The fact that this technology exists is underexploited inside Google, even though it directly impacts some of our most ambitious projects."
'Directly Competing With Open Source Is a Losing Proposition'
"This recent progress has direct, immediate implications for our business strategy. Who would pay for a Google product with usage restrictions if there is a free, high quality alternative without them?
"And we should not expect to be able to catch up. The modern internet runs on open source for a reason. Open source has some significant advantages that we cannot replicate."
'We Need Them More Than They Need Us'
"Keeping our technology secret was always a tenuous proposition. Google researchers are leaving for other companies on a regular cadence, so we can assume they know everything we know, and will continue to for as long as that pipeline is open.
"But holding on to a competitive advantage in technology becomes even harder now that cutting edge research in LLMs is affordable. Research institutions all over the world are building on each other’s work, exploring the solution space in a breadth-first way that far outstrips our own capacity. We can try to hold tightly to our secrets while outside innovation dilutes their value, or we can try to learn from each other."
'Owning the Ecosystem: Letting Open Source Work for Us'
"Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.
"The value of owning the ecosystem cannot be overstated. Google itself has successfully used this paradigm in its open source offerings, like Chrome and Android. By owning the platform where innovation happens, Google cements itself as a thought leader and direction-setter, earning the ability to shape the narrative on ideas that are larger than itself.
"The more tightly we control our models, the more attractive we make open alternatives. Google and OpenAI have both gravitated defensively toward release patterns that allow them to retain tight control over how their models are used. But this control is a fiction. Anyone seeking to use LLMs for unsanctioned purposes can simply take their pick of the freely available models.
"Google should establish itself a leader in the open source community, taking the lead by cooperating with, rather than ignoring, the broader conversation. This probably means taking some uncomfortable steps, like publishing the model weights for small ULM variants. This necessarily means relinquishing some control over our models. But this compromise is inevitable. We cannot hope to both drive innovation and control it."
What about OpenAI?
"All this talk of open source can feel unfair given OpenAI’s current closed policy. Why do we have to share, if they won’t? But the fact of the matter is, we are already sharing everything with them in the form of the steady flow of poached senior researchers. Until we stem that tide, secrecy is a moot point.
"And in the end, OpenAI doesn’t matter. They are making the same mistakes we are in their posture relative to open source, and their ability to maintain an edge is necessarily in question. Open source alternatives can and will eventually eclipse them unless they change their stance. In this respect, at least, we can make the first move."
