OpenAI started the year off by showing off DALL-E, the first version of the text-to-image

 OpenAI started the year off by showing off DALL-E, the first version of the text-to-image

 model that would soon become a household name. They had begun showing that LLMs, through systems like CLIP, can perform more than language tasks, and acted rather as an all-purpose interpretation and generation engine. (To be clear, I don’t mean “artificial general intelligence” or AGI, just that the process worked for more than a preset collection of verbal commands.)

In 2022, more tweaks to Assistant, more smart displays, more AR in Maps, and a $100 million acquisition of AI-generated profile pictures. OpenAI released DALL-E 2 in April and ChatGPT in December.

At some point, I suspect early 2022, Google executives opened their eyes and what they saw scared the hell out of them. I’m picturing the scene in Lord of the Rings where Denethor finally looks out at the gathered armies of Mordor. But instead of losing their minds and being laid out by a wizard, these frantic VPs sent out emails asking why some pert startup was running circles around the world leader in AI. Especially after they practically invented the means do do so.