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Tech In Depth

AI Competition Pushes Some to Areas They Didn’t Want to Go

A symbol for the OpenAI virtual assistant on a smartphone.

Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
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Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter about the business of tech from Bloomberg’s journalists around the world. Today, Ellen Huet considers the effects of the competition for supremacy among artificial intelligence companies.

Tech Across the Globe

AI boom: SK Hynix reported record earnings and said it would quicken the pace of spending on advanced memory production equipment to meet still-increasing demand for artificial intelligence products and services.

Management change: Veteran tech executive Tom Siebel said he will step aside as chief executive officer at his software company, C3.ai, after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that affects his sight.

Intel’s troubles: The chipmaker’s sales forecast offered a glimmer of hope to investors, but executives provided few answers to questions about whether the once-mighty company can improve its technology enough to gain the trust of potential customers.

Revalued

JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce company, is in advanced talks to acquire Ceconomy AG in a deal that could value the German electronics retailer at about $2.6 billion. The proposed acquisition, which would be a 23% premium to Ceconomy’s closing price on Wednesday, “reflects the company’s potential as a European entry point for JD.com, and strong profit-recovery expectations,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts.

One-upmanship

Artificial intelligence models reached a new milestone this week — but the event got overshadowed by the race between competing AI labs.

OpenAI and Google DeepMind said over the past weekend that their models had achieved gold-medal level results on this year’s International Math Olympiad, a global math competition for extremely smart high schoolers.

Seen one way, it’s a remarkable achievement. An AI model solved a new, complex challenge. And it was done using natural language, unlike a year ago, when DeepMind announced silver-level results only after they had translated the questions into a more formal language for math programming.

But something else distracted from the celebration: How did one lab announce its victory ahead of the other, and why?

OpenAI went first. On Saturday morning, researcher Alex Wei posted on social network X about the company’s results, calling it “a big deal” and “a longstanding grand challenge in AI.”

On Monday, DeepMind, the AI lab of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, followed with similar news, though it specified that its model had participated directly in the competition and been graded by judges. OpenAI had instead convened a panel of former Olympiad medalists to grade their results. (Google’s blog post headline said it had done so “officially.”)

Then a third lab, Harmonic, said it — and all AI labs that participated — had been asked by Olympiad officials to hold off on their announcement until July 28. That information made it look like OpenAI jumped the gun, then Google announced early in response.

From that point on, the details descended into the weeds. A different OpenAI researcher clarified on X that the company had informed the IMO of its plan to announce and hadn’t been asked to wait. He also said OpenAI hadn’t been invited to participate in a natural language version of the test.

Whether this one-upping was intentional or not, it got me thinking about the highly competitive dynamic between major AI companies. These labs want to advance AI, but they also want to show they are one step ahead of their peers.

Sometimes, the outcome is low-stakes, like who gets the spotlight related to a math competition. But sometimes that need to keep up can influence significant decisions about values and principles.

This week, in a memo leaked to Wired, Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei acknowledged that the race to stay ahead was pressuring the company to reconsider its stance on raising money from certain investors in the Middle East.

Executives at Anthropic, founded by a group of former OpenAI researchers including Amodei, had previously expressed reservations about setting up major data centers in the region, saying it could lead to a “race to the bottom,” he wrote in the memo. “Unfortunately, having failed to prevent that dynamic at the collective level, we’re now stuck with it as an individual company,” he wrote.

“If we want to stay on the frontier, we gain a very large benefit from having access to this capital,” Amodei continued in the memo. “Without it, it is substantially harder to stay on the frontier.”

Quoted

“I would be stapling a green card to the diploma of every foreign STEM student, and inviting them to stay. It’s not like the talent has no place to go.”
Penny Pritzker
former US secretary of commerce and current chair of Harvard University’s governing body
Criticizing immigration barriers imposed on foreign students by the Trump administration as harmful to US scientific and technology research.

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