I am a big fan of Alphabet as a company, but this is how I read the first two paragraphs...
> When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality.
Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI saw back in 2015".
> Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history.
Translation: "Now we live in a time in which AI research and technology has advanced exponentially thanks to the great achievements by our competitors – and we clearly feel left behind."
Personally, I feel AlphaGo was the biggest deal ever. It put AI truly on the map. OpenAI is just a corollary to that, and would not exist without DeepMind in the first place.
What has OpenAI accomplished other than a lot more publicity for AI? If I've been following the story right, Google and a few others have created all the tech breakthroughs and OpenAI just created a way for common folk to play with it then sold out to Microsoft.
> When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality.
Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI saw back in 2015".
> Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history.
Translation: "Now we live in a time in which AI research and technology has advanced exponentially thanks to the great achievements by our competitors – and we clearly feel left behind."