OpenAI was founded to hedge against Google dominating AI and with it the future. It makes me sad how that was lost for pipe dreams (AGI) and terrible leadership.
I fear a Google dystopia. I hope DeepSeek or somebody else will counter-balance their power.
Without having followed the issue of "AI Ethics" that closely, Anthropic seems to me to be relatively non-evil, too.
> Anthropic seems to me to be relatively non-evil, too.
Eh... maybe? We don't yet know the results, but they have been proponents of heavy regulatory interventions since forever. Their plan was basically regulatory capture, where they sell their FUD regarding alignment, "safety" and all that jazz. If they succeed that will be evil, IMO.
The best thing that can happen for us regular users is both healthy competition at the SotA level (which we kinda have, with the big4 labs keeping eachother honest) and support for small open source local models (gemmas, llamas, mistrals, qwens, etc).
That goal has wildly succeeded -- there are now several well financed companies competing against Google.
The goal was supposed to be an ethical competitor as implied by the word "Open" in their name. When Meta and the Chinese are the most ethical of the competitors, you know we're in a bad spot...