OpenAI and Google Race to "Her" - Is the Big Tech Singularity Near? Part 1 with Zvi Mowshowitz

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together, we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, after traveling to California for Google's IO event, and taking some time to process what has been, in all honesty, quite a confusing week, I'm back home and excited to share a timely conversation with Zvi Mowshowitz. While many excellent news roundups have been published over the last few days, including by Zvi on his blog, here we aim to provide a higher level of analysis. We start by discussing the new capabilities that excite us most from a mundane utility perspective, including the native multimodality, lower latency, lower prices, and deeper integrations into platforms that were all previewed this week.
And then we reflect on the fact that while the technical advances are indeed very impressive, most of the products aren't actually available for us to use, and even many of the demos seem quite rushed. And we consider what that might imply. From there, we attempt to get a handle on the competitive and strategic dynamics at play, as the big tech incumbents compete not only with one another, but also with younger, scrappier, and less constrained startups. We assess whether the apparent convergence of the frontier developers' retail and API products may create a winner-take-all, arms race dynamic. And we analyze whether more friend-like AI products could mitigate that concern. We also debate whether the returns to scale and foundation model development mean that the so-called big tech singularity may be near. Where I tend to emphasize the big tech companies' structural advantages and find myself, frankly, bearish on the majority of startups right now, is Zvi tends to place more emphasis on the cultural, bureaucratic, and regulatory barriers to big tech growth, and is more bullish on the challengers.
I think the contrast between our perspectives here is quite interesting, and I hope you find it useful. Finally, we address arguably the biggest news of the week, the string of departures from OpenAI's safety team, including what it almost certainly does not imply, what it in fact might, and what the departed safety researchers and safety community should do now. We recorded this on a Friday morning, and it was actually during our recording that Jan Lejka posted a thread explaining his reasons for leaving OpenAI. And while we didn't have a chance to discuss his post specifically, I do think our overall analysis holds up in light of his statement. At a high level, the only thing that's crystal clear at this point is that the situation is increasingly complicated and moving so quickly that we should all be really honest about our fundamental uncertainty and remain open to changing our minds on key questions. I, for one, certainly am. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends. If you think we missed anything important or got anything wrong, we invite you to share your feedback via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network.
Now, I hope you enjoy this timely analysis of another intense week in AI with Zvi Mowshowitz. Zvi Mowshowitz, welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. It's always a busy week when you're here, and I don't think that's a coincidence. We've got a lot to cover.

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (3:10)
I'm very confident it's not a coincidence.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:12)
I thought we would maybe organize this sort of as you do your blog posts.
Start with the mundane utility and what we're excited about, and then get into maybe what we're not so excited about, and then maybe get into what we're worried about. I think we've got some good topics for each of those sections this week. How's that sound?

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (3:30)
Yeah, that's definitely the right things to do, and there's definitely coverage all around.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:35)
Cool. Or not cool, depending on the section we're talking about.

**Zvi Mowshowitz** (3:38)
Yeah, it's not so cool.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:40)
Let's start off with then obviously busy week with OpenAI making some launches, Google making some launches slash announcements. I guess both of them really making launches slash announcements, which is one of the bits of analysis that I want to get into. But I guess for starters, what stood out to you as the new capabilities that are most exciting to you as somebody in search of an incrementally better life?