Inside the players and politics of today’s AI industry

We have a special episode Decoder today – I went last week, so Edge Deputy Managing Editor Alex Heath and our novel senior AI reporter, Kylie Robison, fill in for me on a very different AI episode.

But we don’t spend much time on the day-to-day happenings of the AI ​​industry itself. And for good reason: it’s happening so swift and changing so often that it’s almost impossible for the average person to keep up. Understanding the different players, who’s building what, and what people in the industry honestly think about where this is all going – that’s a lot.

So we thought it would be a good idea to take a break and ask Alex and Kylie to break down the state-of-the-art AI boom as it currently exists: the companies you need to know, the biggest news of the last few months, and what it’s actually like to be completely immersed in it industry every day.

You’ll hear Alex and Kylie talk about OpenAI, the gravitational impact it’s having on the entire tech sector, and how Google is trying to challenge it – with mixed results. But they also got into the connection between the overzealous hype driving AI funding and product development and the very real paranoia in the Bay Area around what Kylie refers to as p(doom)an abbreviation for the percentage of probability that artificial intelligence could actually kill us all.

They also analyze all the major AI companies, assess the likelihood of some smaller AI startup overtaking ChatGPT, the open-vs-closed-source debate, and, as Alex puts it, “the Wall Street imitation of AI.”

Oh, and note the mention of effective accelerator marvel where Grimes DJed for OpenAI’s chief technology officer. These are all real words, all in the same sentence.