On June 20th, 2024, artificial intelligence darling Nvidia surpassed $3 trillion in market cap. As a result, the chip maker became the most valuable company in the world, beating out Microsoft and Apple. Some are wondering if Nvidia’s current valuation is justified and sustainable. Some are arguing that we’re still just at the beginning of the Generative AI boom. However, others aren’t yet convinced that AI will deliver on the hype that tools like ChatGPT have created.
Generative artificial intelligence
In this context, Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) refers to a trending class of machine learning applications that are able to create new data, including text, images, video, or sounds, based on a large dataset on which it has been trained. Here are some other GenAI firms that could be some alternate firms to check out if NVIDIA is too rich to buy at this level.
Artificial Intelligence vendors
Adobe is most famous for its creative software like PhotoShop. However, the company has expanded into artificial intelligence. Adobe planned to acquire Figma in a $20 billion deal announced in September 2022. They called off the deal in December 2023 due to antitrust concerns in Europe. Adobe’s latest image generation model, Firefly 3, announced in April 2024. The model brings a new level of high-quality images and better understanding of prompts given.
- Key Products: Adobe Sensei, Adobe Firefly, AI Assistant
- Company value: $200.86 billion
Google and its parent company Alphabet expanded into artificial intelligence with the formation of its Google AI division in 2017. In 2023, the company announced BARD. The company designed BARD to compete with Microsoft’s integration of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. The early release was marked by reported internal disapproval of the product.
- Key Products: Gemini, Vertex AI, Gemini for Google Workspace
- Company value: $1.72 trillion
Known for its scalable cloud infrastructure, Amazon has also thrown its virtual hat into artificial intelligence ring. Yet, the e-commerce and cloud giant finds itself playing catch-up in generative AI.
According to Business Insider’s sources, a stealth internal project code-named Metis, is it next step in AI. “Metis” will be powered by an internal Amazon AI model called Olympus. The latter will power Remarkable Alexa, a new, more capable version of Alexa for a monthly subscription fee.
Metis will reportedly use a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), according to BI. RAG will enable Metis to retrieve information from beyond the original data used to train the underlying model. This means Metis will offer more up-to-date responses like the latest stock prices or medical reaserach, while other chatbots still produce inaccurate or outdated information.
AWS offers a suite of AI services, including GenAI models for text, speech and image processing.
- Key Products: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon SageMaker
- Company value: $1.79 trillion
Anthropic announced the third generation of its Claude generative AI chatbot, which competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Claude AI is a constitutional chatbot. It has been trained to make judgments based on a set of principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN Declaration and Apple’s terms of service, which expands to issues in the digital domain. Claude 2 has complex choice-making capabilities and scored 76.5% on the multiple choice section of the bar exam. While it hasn’t quite had the publicity of the big artificial intelligence chatbots it looks like Anthropic might have created a worthy competitor.
- Key Products: Claude 3, Claude API
- Company value: $15 billion
Cohere is a company which focuses on building artificial intelligence models for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers can use their own data to train their AI models, without sharing that data. Their primary focus is on creating AI systems that can: understand, generate and, interact with human language.
- Key Products: Command, Embed, Chat, Generate, Semantic Search
- Company value: $2.2 billion
IBM’s Watson was the first artificial intelligence language model technology to attain global notoriety, as a result of its 2011 victory on the quiz show Jeopardy!. Watson was question-answering platform, initially developed from 2004-2011. Since then, its deep learning capabilities have been applied to a wide range of industries, including healthcare, cuisine, hospitality, water conservation, and more. IBM has continued to evolve it’s AI capabilities. In the past 5 years, IBM has filed 1,591 AI-related US patent applications. In April 2024, IBM announced its acquisition of HasiCorp. for $6.4 billion.
- Key Products: WatsonX.ai, Code Assistant, Slate, Granite
- Company value: $153.76 billion
Jasper uses artificial intelligence to help businesses write marketing content. They claim it can write the same content much faster than a human being can, in a tone of voice that customers relate to and find familiar. It helps businesses generate consistent and effective digital marketing content, from blog posts to social media updates.
- Key Products: Jasper, Jasper API, Jasper AI Copilot
- Company value: $1.2 billion
Meta (Facebook)
Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has grown to where 3.14 billion people interact with one of their platform’s daily. The company is known for its social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. While the company has faced criticisms harmful misinformation, polarizing political content, and data leaks.
For years, Meta has used artificial intelligence to recommend posts in our feeds, moderate content, and target ads behind the scenes in Instagram and Facebook.
- Key Products: Meta AI, Llama 2.0, Llama 3.0 (coming soon), Seamless Communication models
- Company value: $1.252 trillion
Microsoft largest artificial intelligence company
Microsoft has claimed to be the world’s largest artificial intelligence company. MSFT has made a $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January 2023. They then integrated ChatGPT generative AI chatbot and Dall-E image generation into the Bing search engine and Edge web browser.
- Key Products: Microsoft Copilot, Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Copilot in Bing
- Company value: $3.01 trillion
Midjourney AI specializes in creating AI-powered tools that generate realistic and imaginative images from text descriptions. It offers tiered subscriptions and allows users to monetize their AI-assisted artwork. It’s integrated into various platforms, including Discord and Microsoft Edge.
In late March 2023, Midjourney suspended free trials due to people abusing the system.
- Key Products: Midjourney AI
- Company value: $10 billion
NVIDIA king of artificial intelligence
NVIDIA started working on 3D graphics graphics processing units (GPUs) for multimedia and gaming companies in 1993. The company also began creating artificial intelligence applications back in 2012. Today, NVIDIA is generally considered the leader in AI technology as it is at the forefront of AI and is developing software, chips and AI-related services.The company commands 87% of the GPU market and has had a hand in major AI technology advancements, including ChatGPT, which was trained using 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs. The NVIDIA NeMO LLM’s status as one of the most advanced large language models, along with a new partnership with Microsoft, further cement its place among prominent AI companies.
- Key Products: NVIDIA AI, NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA BioNeMo, NVIDIA Picasso, various chips and GPUs
- Company value: $2.14 trillion
OpenAI sparked the artificial intelligence boom
OpenAI continues to lead the GenAI space with its GPT-4 model, widely used across industries for natural language processing tasks. OpenAI’s tools are integrated into numerous applications, from customer service chatbots to creative writing assistants.
In contrast, OpenAI has famously scooped up data from everywhere to train its chatbots, like Reddit. And, when a user uploads information into OpenAI to ask ChatGPT to do a task, OpenAI uses that data to train its models for everyone’s use. Users can opt out of that, but it’s one of the reasons why companies warn their employees not to share data with OpenAI.
- Key Products: GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Sora
- Company value: $80 billion
Stability AI excels in creating advanced AI models, particularly the Stable Diffusion series, that generate high-quality, realistic images from text prompts. They offer models in multiple languages and for commercial use, emphasizing photorealism and complex prompt processing.
- Key Products: Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Video Diffusion, Stable Audio, Stable Zero123
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Ralph Bach has been in IT for a while and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow me on Facebook. Email the Bach Seat here.
Who would have thought that the mastermind behind Windows would ever trade coding for choreography? Ernie Smith at Tedium surfaced a video of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates on a Broadway stage. In the fall of 1992, Microsoft spent $2 million to turn Mr. Gates into a Broadway star. The show, “How to Succeed in Business with Workgroup Computing,” opened (and closed) at Broadway’s Gershwin Theater, one of the biggest theaters in New York.
The show celebrated and promoted Windows for Workgroups. Microsoft released Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in November 1993. It introduced support for 32-bit file access, drive sharing, and group calendaring. It also had built-in fax capabilities.
According to the Washington Post review of the extravaganza. The show cast Gates as a hero computer consultant who saves two employees, Jake and Max, from an impossible deadline. Gates demonstrated the miracle of computer networking to the beleaguered Kitty Carnival Amusement company employees using Windows for Workgroups. One of the actors exclaimed, “We’re not worthy!” in typical “Wayne’s World” fashion. Gates even attempted a dance routine with some performers dressed as the Blues Brothers, resulting in a symphony of misplaced steps and flailing arms. Mr Gates said,
Who says 
“You get this kind of runaway feedback,” Alex Bradley explained. He is an ice dynamics researcher at BAS and author of the paper. It behaves like a tipping point, he told 
Illinois,