Oh, and also imagine that nobody really knows what plutonium is, there is just one startup who had figured out how to turn uranium to plutonium.
Also that understanding of uranium for now is at the level when it was just discovered. So people are still handling it by bare hands. And trying to sell shiny uranium toys.
That’s quite the understatement, isn’t it? Neither Google nor Meta have been able to demonstrate something to the public that resonates even close the the altitude that OpenAI has.
But more critically, chat.openai.com is more of a tech demo than a serious product. So one can optimize the UX for "chatty and engaging" without being too concerned for accuracy. Bing, on the other hand, is intended to be a search product. It's noteworthy that adjusting the same model to provide a more accurate search experience seems to have snuffed out a lot of the magic.
Will they really be determined by OpenAI? So far what Altman has accomplished with OpenAI is to push a lot of existing research tech out into the open world (with improvements, of course.) This has in turn forced the hands of the original developers at Google and Meta to push their own research out into the open world and further step up their internal efforts. And that in turn creates fierce pressure on OpenAI to move even faster, and take even fewer precautions.
Metaphorically, there was a huge pile of rocks perched at the top of a hill. Altman's push got the rocks rolling, but there's really no guarantee that anyone will have much say in where they end up.