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Notes -
Yeah, sadly, none of the AI companies have given us a ton of reason to trust them. I think we're kind of lucky that it ended up being a two- or three- (remember Gemini?) or even four-way race (Grok isn't terrible ya know). My outside opinion is that OpenAI is the most liberty-minded of the first three, but I think even they would be happily walling off capabilities if it didn't mean losing business to their competitors.
I still hold a deep, deep grudge against DeepMind (and Google) for revolutionizing computer Go ... and then not giving us access to it. They could have made a huge profit off of AlphaGo - Go players would happily pay hand over fist for access to it - but daddy Google wouldn't even notice a few million in profit here or there and it wasn't worth taking time out from their research playground to make tens of thousands of players happy. Or, you know, usher in a new wave of strategic innovation in one of humanity's oldest games. BO-ring!
Remember, Google had internal chatbots years before ChatGPT.
If it wasn't for OpenAI catching up, they might still be sitting on them for "safety reasons" (and coincidentally also protecting their main product, search). That's the future if they win - tons of prestigious AI papers for them, almost nothing for us consumers, because we're just not worth the trouble. And Anthropic might be even worse, since, like you said, they really do think they're holding back technology for our own good.
OpenAI's far from a perfect company, but man, I'll take what I can get.
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