Vladimir Lenin had a saying that “there are decades where nothing happens. And then there are weeks, where decades happen.” The week gone by was one such in the world of AI, even by the new standards set by the ChatGPT launch. It started with a bang on Monday, when OpenAI unveiled its new flagship product GPT4o. Tuesday was Google’s turn, with its flagship I/O mentioning AI 121 times over the 110-minute event. The same day OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left the company, blowing a hole in their claims of safety and responsibility. The ripples created by each of these would have a profound impact on AI in the future.

Let’s start with the GPT4o announcement, where OpenAI built in effortless multimodality into its existing flagship product. The model had its expected share of gee-whiz features: very fluid simultaneous translation, deciphering of human emotion beyond just voice, and an enhanced ability to write code, among others. Very quickly people started discovering even more fantastic use cases – two GPT4o AI’s talking to each other, personalised step-by-step trigonometry tutoring, and helping a blind man hail an empty cab in London. Many people had expected a new GPT5 or GPT 4.5 model, but to me, however, this is bigger than a GPT5. The reason is simple. Gartner made an insightful statement on GenAI, saying that ‘It is not a technology or a trend. It is a profound shift in the way humans and machines interact.” Bill Gates followed it up with an equally profound one that “AI is the new UI.” With GPT4 and others, with text interface and a lagged voice interface, you could still believe you were talking to a machine. With GPT4o if you did not know that the speaker was an AI, you would believe it was a human conversing with you and seeing the same things that you saw, feeling the same emotions that you felt, and cracking the same jokes and sarcasm your friends do. With GPT4o, the Sound Turing Test has been passed. The model moved beyond voice to sound.

The next day, Google picked up the gauntlet that OpenAI had thrown. They had a plethora of impressive announcements, though a lot were prototypes. Ask Photos allows intuitive search through Google Photos, a more powerful and advanced version of their LLM Gemini was announced, there was an intriguing AI agent that can return products that you have shopped, another that warns you live that a phone call is a scam. Project Astra impressed with its ability to recognise code, cities, and even where you have forgotten your glasses. More powerful text to image, text to music, and Veo, the new text to Video. A new TPU and a big announcement on Search with AI Overviews.

The subtext: basically, there is no Google product which is not going to be baptised with AI. Google search with 2bn+ users and 6mn searches a minute, gets a GenAI makeover. Gmail with 1.8bn users gets a strong dose of Vitamin AI. YouTube’s 1.8bn users can have AI generated text summaries of the nearly 4bn videos that the site hosts. Another 4bn Android users get AI on tap, and the list goes on. Ironically, however, it seems that Google is following the Microsoft playbook here. Microsoft famously had an EEE strategy of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish: first they created a product using open standards, then created a proprietary extension which quickly gained dominance through its brute distribution and ownership of the PC market, and finally used this extension to swamp the market and extinguish their competitor. Latest example: MS 365 has 345mn users, 320mn of them get Teams free; rival Slack languishes at 39mn. So, OpenAI with its plucky innovation can bring eye-popping products like ChatGPT, Sora, and GPT4o galore, but what they lack is distribution. The ChatGPT needle is stuck at

100mn plus. Impressive, but small potatoes compared to Google’s ownership of the Internet with billions of users everywhere. Thus, Google does not need to out-innovate OpenAI, they just need to out-distribute it, and that is precisely what I/O demonstrated.

While all this was exciting, the canary in the coalmine could be Ilya’s exit from OpenAI. With him went other prominent researchers, and the disbanding of the super-alignment team that was responsible for building AGI safely. It signalled the transition of OpenAI from an idealistic research lab to a thick-skinned capitalist entity, driving shareholder return over principles. This is where OpenAI and Google are remarkably similar – when it started, Google flaunted its ‘Don’t be evil’ motto, but over the years, much like OpenAI, quietly buried it in the graveyard of capitalism.