The model training for the IMO Gold medal was a fluid, hackathon-like effort among four "captains" in London, Mountain View, and Singapore. The team operated with a highly ad-hoc workflow, passing responsibilities across continents as individuals traveled, ensuring continuous progress.
In a remote environment, immediate access to colleagues isn't always possible. A GPT loaded with context about your company and cofounders' thinking can act as a thought partner, helping you overcome the "blank slate" problem without scheduling a meeting.
Rather than relying on formal knowledge sharing, Alphabet's X embeds central teams (like legal, finance, prototyping) that float between projects. These individuals become natural vectors, carrying insights, best practices, and innovative ideas from one project to another, fostering organic knowledge transfer.
To truly integrate AI, go beyond simply telling your team to "learn more." The founder of Search Atlas advocates for organizing multi-day, in-person hackathons. This focused, collaborative environment, where teams tackle specific problems together, fosters a deeper and faster mastery of practical AI applications than solo, online efforts can achieve.
While AI inference can be decentralized, training the most powerful models demands extreme centralization of compute. The necessity for high-bandwidth, low-latency communication between GPUs means the best models are trained by concentrating hardware in the smallest possible physical space, a direct contradiction to decentralized ideals.
The next frontier for AI isn't just personal assistants but "teammates" that understand an entire team's dynamics, projects, and shared data. This shifts the focus from single-user interactions to collaborative intelligence by building a knowledge graph connecting people and their work.
While chat works for human-AI interaction, the infinite canvas is a superior paradigm for multi-agent and human-AI collaboration. It allows for simultaneous, non-distracting parallel work, asynchronous handoffs, and persistent spatial context—all of which are difficult to achieve in a linear, turn-based chat interface.
A key decision behind Google DeepMind's IMO Gold medal was abandoning their successful specialized system (AlphaGeometry) for an end-to-end LLM. This reflects a core AGI philosophy: a truly general model must solve complex problems without needing separate, specialized tools.
Google's strategy involves building specialized models (e.g., Veo for video) to push the frontier in a single modality. The learnings and breakthroughs from these focused efforts are then integrated back into the core, multimodal Gemini model, accelerating its overall capabilities.
Microsoft's new data centers, like Fairwater 2, are designed for massive scale. They use high-speed networking to aggregate computing power across different sites and even regions (e.g., Atlanta and Wisconsin), enabling training of unprecedentedly large models on a single job.
Unlike rivals building massive, centralized campuses, Google leverages its advanced proprietary fiber networks to train single AI models across multiple, smaller data centers. This provides greater flexibility in site selection and resource allocation, creating a durable competitive edge in AI infrastructure.