OpenAI vs Google - An Interesting Case of Nash Equilibrium

Competition makes you play the same game

Hello Folks,

Today’s post in not exactly related to Marketing Measurement and attribution. But don’t be disappointed, in this post we will talk about an interesting concept of Nash Equilibrium and how that affects marketing strategy.

As you must have seen, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o is the talk of the world right now. It is no doubt a technological feat.

However, what surprised me the most was Google also releasing similar features 'voice assistants' - multi modal capabilities .

In fact the demo teaser of Google as part of their Google IO event seems identical to what OpenAI released yesterday - asking the model to describe what is being shown in the video.

I wondered how come Google is releasing the same identical product as OpenAI and that too almost at the same time.

Then the answer struck me - Nash Equilibrium.

A more layman example would be - seeing that a bunch of coffee shops all being next to each other or that two gas stations being next to each other.

In a nutshell, Nash Equilibrium is about is a situation where no player could gain by changing their own strategy (holding all other players' strategies fixed).

Competition makes you play the same game

Seeing the ChatGPT vs Google from the lens of Nash Equilibrium makes you see that competition makes you play the same game. In some interview I read that Google said that it is not dancing to Microsoft's tunes.

But the reality seems to be that it is indeed dancing to its tunes or to be fair both are dancing to the tune of Nash Equilibrium !!

Hot Take

I know ChatGPT-4o is the buzzword in the town and it is a technological feat. No doubt on that. I will certainly be a user. However it is not a civilization altering technology.

To me Google seems to be losing focus. Few weeks ago I read about how Google's Deepmind's groundbreaking AI for protein structure can now model DNA !! This to me is civilization altering.

Yes the demo of such breakthrough technology won't be as dramatic as OpenAI's demo of yesterday. Probably such a demo would be understood by less than 1% of the population.

However, breakthrough like Google's Deepmind is what a civilization altering technology looks like.

It remains to be seen if in the Google IO event, Google dances to its own tune (Deepmind breakthrough) or focuses more on multi-modal voice assistant feature like OpenAI's.

If Google focuses on Deepmind like breakthroughs, my money is on them for the AI race. But lets see🙂.

---

Thanks for reading.

For consulting and help with MMM implementation, Click here

Stay tuned for more articles on MMM.