Polarized Whites, OpenAI is Walking Away with It, & Landing Rockets is Cool

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The Financial Times featured some great work from polling firm, Echelon Insights, showing that whites in the US are now increasingly polarizing to the right and left leaving the majority of minorities in the middle.

It’s also interesting to see how white conservatives were always more out there on the ideological scale. They’ve moved up some but it’s really white democrats who have moved the most.

Keep in mind that Echelon is a right of center firm run by Kristen Soltis Anderson but they do good work. I don’t think either party has fully dealt with the implications of this.

Pointer from Chartbook.

Over at Random Walk, Moses shows us that ChatGPT/OpenAI is breaking out from its competitors, at least on the consumer side.

I’m working on a post called, Is Google A Dead Player? My theory is that its massive search business has made Google fat and happy. A better title might be, is Google the next ATT or Xerox? They invented the “T (transformer)” in GPT and another company took it and used it to dominate the market.

This is a pattern. Kodak invented the digital camera. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) developed the computer mouse and much of the modern graphical user interface like the icon and the concept of windows. Steve Jobs famously visited PARC and then developed all those technologies for Apple.

Is Google the next roadkill? I think we have to say that as far as consumer focused generative AI, they are way behind. The key moment to me came with the release of Gemini 1.5 last winter. It famously wouldn’t make images of white people. It was clear that Alphabet’s DEI bureaucracy and overall bureaucracy had completely failed on what had to be the biggest priority for the company.

This would have been a time to clean house the way Zuckerberg did at Meta or Elon at X but the response from CEO, Sundar Pichai, was muted at best. That’s when it became clear Google wasn’t a live player anymore.

That said, the company still has many hands to play and AI is used for lots of things beyond generative AI like ad targeting. Google’s still in the game but with a bloated bureaucracy and an inability to deliver on key priorities, I think we have to say it isn’t a favorite to win the AI race.

This was just amazing. Elon acts like a 5 year old sometimes but he has done more for technology than any living human. Just incredible:

Keep learning,

Alan

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