It hasn't been too long since the world saw Chatgpt. Nowadays it's used by so many people. Students are using it to help them with learning although some tend to try and abuse it and use it to do their entire assignments. Companies use ChatGPT to generate ideas, strategies and solutions to their problems.
It's almost one of the most widely used websites today. It's is owned by what used to be a startup called OpenAI. The CEO of OpenAI is Sam Altman and not too long ago he acknowledged the efforts of Elon Musk for helping to make OpenAI as massive as it is today.
But what if I told you that the entire story couldn't have been different and that Google should have been OpenAI?
Yes, way back in 2017, some Google researchers stumbled upon a really powerful technology which is now what forms the very heart of ChatGPT. The problem was that when they discovered it, they had doubts about exactly what the impact of this would be to the world. They were exactly optimistic about the who idea of that technology.
Google had the concept of ChatGPT but they decided to wait and see just to make sure it was safe enough to execute. They were being very careful and that's a trait of many big companies. Because they already have a great reputation and great power they knew it came with great responsibility. That were afraid to take the risk of introducing chatgpt to the world.
One of the researchers I'm talking about was Jakob Uszkoreit, and he said that the team knew that that transformer technology they stumbled on was very promising but they never thought it would lead to something as big and as powerful as chatgpt.
They just couldn't see the future of their own work and only thought of the negative impacts of it. But OpenAI took this same idea and has been able to turn it into a tool millions love and use on a daily basis. Google lost the moment and are now racing behind OpenAI with their Gemini.
But Jakob in particular has not stopped dreaming of creating something unique from the same technology. He has decided to apply AI to biology. A very ambitious goal but his plan is to be capable of programming cells just like how programmers program software. Just imagine if we could be capable of doing that, we will be able to manufacture medicines that would work with the same precision as computer codes. I believe that's the future of medicine and if the team doesn't give up they can write the next big story after OpenAI.
So maybe Google is planning on not missing the next big moment because of fear and doubt. They have learned a valuable lesson.