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Google Vs. Open AI (Probably Microsoft)...and AI Versus Education
Howard Lindzon
January 16, 2023
Happy Monday...
The markets are closed today so I will post Momentum Monday tomorrow.
I watched a lot of football yesterday but snuck in a good ride as well.
I wanted to catch up a little on Open AI, Chat GPT and Google since I get asked about it so much.
I have not found it useful, personally...yet. Each time I try it, I find enough errors to just make me want to write it myself. But, I write every day and don't suffer from banging out my thoughts or writing a speech. I definitely don't need to do any school essays.
AI feels like an important and great feature not something I want to invest in yet directly. Every venture capitalist is already talking about it which means I have zero edge at the moment.
The two big AI battles going on now are that between AI and schools and Google and Open AI (which probably means Microsoft which is trying to invest $10 billion in Open AI).
I own Google and am sticking with it. I added a bit at the end of the year. I have no idea how to value Google's own AI acquisition of DeepMind (back in 2014), but this was a good breakdown.
When you get asked about Google versus Open AI, this is a good place to go which dissects each argument.
I got the above link from the VERY good and FREE AI blog Ben's Bites (I love that Ben's Bites uses portfolio company Beehiiv for his newsletter).
On the plus side, it seems like AI should help an enormous amount of people and companies increase productivity and margins.
As for the costs...see 'social media' and what it has already done for human behavior and multiply it by 100?
The other big battle right now is education.
Schools do not like it. The New York Times covered the topic with this piece titled 'Don't Ban Chat GPT in Schools, Teach With It'.
Fred Wilson said mostly the same thing in a blog post. I liked this idea:
We are entering an era when AIs will be available to everyone to use to do work, entertain ourselves, and many other things. We cannot put this genie back in the bottle. We need to embrace it.
I think a better approach would be to require students to use ChatGPT to write an essay or at least help write an essay and then have the students compete to see who can leverage this technology to create the best essay. That would teach the students to use these tools rather than pretend they don’t exist.
I own a slide rule that my dad gave me. He used it for many years until calculators emerged. He told me when calculators first showed up, many educators wanted their students to continue to use slide rules. But eventually, they realized that calculators were better and embraced them.
I think the same thing will happen with AIs. So we might as well get busy integrating them into education instead of banning them.
Hope the links help. Have a great Monday.
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