Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

March 27, the latest data show that Amazon, Microsoft and Google all have thousands or even tens of thousands of artificial intelligence experts, but they still can't catch up with a small team of OpenAI. This is mainly because these big companies are more slow and cautious in translating artificial intelligence technology into products than OpenAI.

The Tuyuan PexelsChatGPT craze has raised a series of questions about the future of artificial intelligence, one of which still reverberates in Silicon Valley: why can't the big tech companies in the industry launch influential innovative services like ChatGPT, which have the world's largest artificial intelligence teams?

Glass. The latest data from ai, an analysis firm based in London, show that Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have an estimated 33000 people directly engaged in artificial intelligence research and development. Amazon has the largest number of employees in artificial intelligence, with 10113; Microsoft has 7133 employees in artificial intelligence; and Google has 4970. Glass. Ai obtained the data by using machine learning technology to traverse the profiles of thousands of employees engaged in artificial intelligence research on the technology companies' websites and recruitment platform LinkedIn. These statistics may not include the layoffs recently announced by Amazon, but they may also exclude software engineers who are actually working in artificial intelligence.

These figures not only show how seriously the world's largest technology companies are doing research in the field of artificial intelligence, but also confirm how slow and cautious they are in using artificial intelligence technology to develop services.

Just a few months after OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chat robot has become the fastest-growing online service in history, prompting Google and Microsoft to compete to plug generative artificial intelligence technology into software products. At the same time, Adobe has launched an artificial intelligence image generator similar to DALL-E 2, Snap recently released a chat robot similar to ChatGPT, and Facebook parent company Meta is creating similar "artificial intelligence characters." The vast majority of these products are caused by the work of a team of OpenAI artificial intelligence experts. But according to Glass.ai, OpenAI's team is only 154people.

Rumor has it in the field of artificial intelligence that OpenAI's success is actually attributed to clever marketing. Over the past two years, the company has indeed been promoting early projects such as the language model GPT-3 and the text generation image system DALL-E 2, but in fact OpenAI's success lies in the fact that the most professional researchers have direct access to the public.

OpenAI is not a product company, but a research and development laboratory. This means that the company did not have a large number of engineers and product managers involved in the release of ChatGPT. In many large technology companies, these engineers and product managers often intervene in product development, inadvertently creating bottlenecks and hindering the development of new technologies.

Amazon has such a negative example of turning artificial intelligence research into a successful product. Despite having the largest artificial intelligence research team in the industry, Amazon's efforts to turn artificial intelligence research into mainstream or innovative products have had mixed success.

Nearly a decade ago, Amazon launched the virtual digital assistant Alexa around the world, offering the service to users free of charge through the $99 Echo speaker. But the Alexa is something of a failure, burning billions of dollars of Amazon's money. Many of Alexa's customers just use it as a music player or timer.

Why are the functions of Alexa and digital assistants such as Apple Siri and Google Assistant so limited, while chatbots such as ChatGPT are so diverse? This is because the large language model behind the latter can automatically generate text based on the large dataset on the network. By contrast, Alexa is based on a command and control system with a limited number of commands, which can only identify fixed commands such as "what time is it?"

An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn't think Amazon has limited capabilities. She added that artificial intelligence has penetrated into all aspects of Amazon's daily operations, involving artificial intelligence in many areas, such as product recommendation, Amazon web services and warehouse logistics systems.

Stability AI has recently established partnerships with some hot companies in the field of machine learning, and AWS uses Amazon Web Services' cloud computing facility to develop and deploy its own image generation tool, Stable Diffusion. In February, Amazon also partnered with French artificial intelligence start-up Huging Face to develop ChatGPT competitions on Amazon Web Services.

Amazon has struggled to develop large-scale artificial intelligence services, but these partnerships could open up a new strategic path for Amazon.

Last Monday, Amazon announced that it would cut another 9000 jobs in the coming weeks, after it had already announced 18000 layoffs. But Amazon has been expanding its artificial intelligence workforce for years and has been hiring heavily over the past five years. Glass. Amazon has hired more people in artificial intelligence after 2018, far ahead of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, according to ai.

Amazon's recent layoffs are likely to focus on its already troubled Alexa business. It is reported that Amazon had about 10, 000 employees developing Alexa as early as November 2022, but that may include many sales and marketing staff. OpenAI's approach to bringing artificial intelligence technology directly to market also has the drawback of releasing a powerful tool that is largely untested to the public. The company regards the first batch of millions of users as experimental subjects, which may cause social harm that it did not expect. It is reported that OpenAI's latest language model, GPT-4, has undergone six months of security testing before its release, but it is not clear how likely these tools are to spread misinformation, subvert traditional livelihoods or be abused by bad actors.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is now streamlining Amazon to make the company's process as efficient as OpenAI. He may need to think more carefully about how to lead his artificial intelligence team, but being cautious is not necessarily a bad thing.

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