Tech Giants Ensuring They Keep Up in the AI Race
As companies rush to harness AI’s potential, big tech giants want to ensure they are right at the heart of AI technologies. Some of 2023’s largest AI investments went to leading foundation models and other development platforms: OpenAI ($10B corporate minority from Microsoft), Anthropic ($2.6B in funding over multiple rounds backed by Google and Amazon), and Databricks ($500M Series I backed by Nvidia’s NVentures with follow-on participation from AWS and Microsoft).
But by way of acquisition or investment, these familiar big named tech companies have proven instrumental in the industry’s growth. Not only developing advanced AI technologies, but also fostering innovation across the industry by providing accessible tools, resources, and frameworks for the broader developer and research community. Their efforts in AI ethics, transparency, and fairness also set important precedents for the responsible growth of AI technologies.
Here are some of the large, leading companies in the AI space:
1. Google (Alphabet Inc.)
Our list wouldn’t be complete without a Google mention. The search engine giant is also forging its way into the AI space with Google AI (including TensorFlow, Google’s open-source machine learning framework), and DeepMind, a subsidiary focused on AI research, that’s creating cool apps like VideoFX powered by Veo.
Prompt: extreme close-up with a shallow depth of field of a puddle in a street. reflecting a busy futuristic Tokyo city with bright neon signs, night, lens flare
2. Microsoft
Microsoft has integrated AI into its suite of products from Office 365 to LinkedIn, to its Azure cloud platform. The company’s AI-powered Polly platform features a full suite of business process and operational functionality and is used by over 200,000 companies.
3. IBM
In 2011, IBM Watson defeated two champions in the Jeopardy! Challenge, introducing the world to arguably the first glimpse of practical artificial intelligence. To find and understand the clues in the questions, Watson compared possible answers by ranking its confidence in their accuracy, and responded — all in under three seconds.
As organizations integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations, AI assistants that merge generative AI with automation are proving to be key productivity drivers. AI assistants from IBM facilitate enterprise adoption of AI to modernize business operations.
With watsonx.ai, you can build AI applications in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the data. Watsonx.ai offers:
- Multi-model variety and flexibility: Choose from IBM-developed, open-source and third-party models, or bring your own model.
- Differentiated client protection: IBM stands behind IBM-developed models and indemnifies the client against third-party IP claims.
- End-to-end AI governance: Enterprises can scale and accelerate the impact of AI with trusted data across the business, using data wherever it resides.
- Hybrid, multi-cloud deployments: IBM provides the flexibility to integrate and deploy your AI workloads into your hybrid-cloud stack of choice.
4. Amazon
In March of this year, Amazon completed a $4 billion dollar investment in Anthropic, developers of the state-of-the art generative AI Claude 3 family of models. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, Anthropic announced it will be using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research, and future foundation model development. AWS provides a robust and scalable platform for deploying AI models.
Here’s a list of eight ways Amazon is using generative AI to deliver more robust and personalized user experiences, including:
- Product review highlights that provide a short summary of the product and roundup of customer review sentiment, enabling customers to size up a product at a glance without sorting through all the reviews.
- Amazon One, a fast and convenient contactless identity service that enables customers to use their palm to make payments, verify their ages, or enter locations.
5. NVIDIA
NVIDIA powers many AI and deep learning frameworks with its high-performance GPUs, but as the company’s founder, Jensen Huang, illustrated at the onset of the company’s 2024 GTC conference, the company is more about solutions than mere hardware.
In addition to cool apps like NVIDIA Canvas, which uses AI to turn simple user brushstrokes into realistic landscape images. . It is crucial for advancements in AI research, autonomous vehicles, and gaming. Nvidia’s hardware solutions power AI systems across industries, driving innovation and performance in AI development.
One of NVIDIA’s key products is edge AI. Edge AI is the deployment of AI applications in devices throughout the physical world. It’s called “edge AI” because the AI computation is done near the user at the edge of the network, close to where the data is located, rather than centrally in a cloud computing facility or private data center.
6. Facebook (Meta Platforms Inc.)
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp has made significant investments in developing its own open-source AI models. Meta’s LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI, announced at the 2023 Connect Conference) is a 65-billion parameter model that has gained popularity among researchers and the generative AI community due to its open-source nature, allowing for customization and tweaking of the training data.
In April of 2024, the company proudly announced the consumer-facing Meta AI application as one of the world’s leading AI assistants. Advertised as “already on your phone, in your pocket for free,” Meta AI has been integrated into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. You may have already seen and used Meta AI, in fact, when scrolling through your Facebook Feed.
Come across a post you’re interested in? You can ask Meta AI for more info right from the post, as in this example.
Arranging a get together with friends on Instagram Chat? Meta AI can help coordinate that, too, as an integral part of your communication thread.
7. OpenAI
OpenAI could be considered the company that gave AI democratization its quantum leap. The company behind groundbreaking AI models like GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and the widely popular ChatGPT, has emerged as a frontrunner in the AI race. ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.
OpenAI’s founding goal was to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” and the company continues to advance its models to remain at the forefront of the generative AI revolution. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has stated that GPT-4 cost over $100 million to train, and is considered one of the three most capable models currently available, alongside Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus and Google DeepMind’s Gemini Ultra.
8. Baidu
Baidu, often referred to as China’s Google, has made significant strides in the field of AI technology, particularly with its ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) large language models. The company recently unveiled ERNIE 3.5, which it claims outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 in several Chinese language capabilities.
Baidu excels in conversational AI with its DuerOS software, and in autonomous driving with its Apollo. A melding of the two technologies can be seen below.
