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Netscape and Microsoft Redux?

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In the mid 90s, the Netscape browser introduced most of the world to the web and brought on the Internet era. Microsoft, which was the dominant tech company at the time, famously reacted by bunding its Internet Explorer browser into the Windows operating system and started taking share from Netscape. Eventually, Internet Explorer became the dominant web browser and Netscape was sold to AOL. Ironically, that battle for Internet dominance missed that the most important piece of software was the search engine, not the browser. And so the winnner ended up being an entirely different company - Google. As Mark Twain famously told us: History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme Google's purchase of DeepMind back in 2014 was the first shot fired in the foundation model battle. Google went on to develop the transformer architecture and it shared that idea with the world in a paper written in 2017. OpenAI took that architecture and started training large language models and introduced GPT1

Netscape and Microsoft Redux? In the mid 90s, the Netscape browser introduced most of the world to the web and brought on the Internet era. Microsoft, which was the dominant tech company at the time, famously reacted by bunding its Internet Explorer browser into the Windows operating system and started taking share from Netscape. Eventually, Internet Explorer became the dominant web browser and Netscape was sold to AOL. Ironically, that battle for Internet dominance missed that the most important piece of software was the search engine, not the browser. And so the winnner ended up being an ent

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