Over the past month we've seen a rapid series of notable AI-related announcements and releases from both Google and OpenAI, and it's had the heads of the AI community spinning. It has also added fuel to the fire of the rivalry between OpenAI and Google, an accelerating game of one-upmanship that is playing out unusually close to the Christmas holidays.
“How do people survive with the firehose of AI updates coming out,” one user wrote last Friday on X, which remains a hotbed of AI-related conversations. “in the last <24 hours we have gemini flash 2.0 and chatGPT with screenshare, deep research, pika 2, sora, chatGPT projects, anthropic clio, it never ends."
Rumors travel quickly in the AI world, and people in the AI industry were expecting OpenAI to ship some major products in December. When OpenAI announced “12 Days of OpenAI” earlier this month, Google jumped into gear and seemingly decided to try to edge its rival on several counts. So far the strategy appears to be working, but at the expense of the rest of the world's ability to absorb the implications of the new releases.
“12 Days of OpenAI has grown to about 50 new @GoogleAI releases,” another X user wrote on Monday. “Over the past week, OpenAI and Google have released at the speed of a newborn startup,” a third X user wrote on Tuesday. “Even their own users can't keep up. Crazy times we live in.”
“Someone told Google they could just do stuff,” a16z partner and AI influencer Justine Moore wrote on X, referencing a common motivational meme that told people they could “just do stuff.”
The Google AI rush
OpenAI's “12 Days of OpenAI” campaign includes releases of their full o1 model, an upgrade from o1-preview, in addition to o1-pro for advanced “reasoning” tasks. The company also launched Sora for video generation, added Projects functionality to ChatGPT, introduced Advanced Voice features with video streaming capabilities, and more.
