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The players set to shape the AI landscape in 2024

March 2024
 by Jorge Repiso

The players set to shape the AI landscape in 2024

March 2024
 By Jorge Repiso

The swift dismissal and subsequent reappointment of OpenAI’s Sam Altman at the end of 2023 underscored not only the importance of security in AI, but also the value of retaining product dominance in the face of emerging AI competitors. OpenAI’s GPT is the Large Language Model (LLM) behind ChatGPT, the most notorious AI chatbot to date. As the race to create and establish a product to challenge ChatGPT gathers pace, we examine the emerging players and products that could shape the AI landscape in 2024.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft was an early backer of OpenAI, having invested $1 billion in 2019 with a further $10 billion announced in 2023, bringing its total stake in the company to 49%. In early 2023, Microsoft released Bing Chat, native to the Microsoft Edge browser and Bing mobile app, powered by the GPT LLM. In November 2023, Microsoft simplified its AI offering by rolling Cortana, Bing Chat and other proprietary assistants into Microsoft Copilot, integrating their AI capabilities into its Office 365 suite of applications.

In 2024, Microsoft is looking to release newer Copilot AI experiences, providing AI assistance across different Microsoft applications. Its continued investment in OpenAI will likely attract scrutiny, with the European Commission signalling the potential launch of a merger probe.

Google Gemini

Google Bard was hastily released in March 2023 in response to the enormous success of OpenAI’s GPT-4. Later in the year, Google also released Gemini, a multimodal LLM, and quickly rebranded many of its AI products (Bard, Assistant, Duet AI) under the Gemini moniker.

Gemini has had multiple updates, adding features such as the ability to generate images from text, but it thrives when used within the Google ecosystem (Gmail, Google Maps, Google Flights, and Google Drive). Gemini’s most significant application is expected to be in its Search Generative Experience, with AI-powered results being displayed more prominently within Google Search.

Claude

The startup behind Claude is Anthropic, founded by the Amodei siblings, who worked on GPT-2 and GPT-3 before leaving OpenAI following disagreements with the company’s vision for building safety into AI models. Anthropic uses Constitutional AI to train Claude, which offers a set of rules and principles (a constitution) to provide helpful, honest and harmless answers while avoiding toxic or discriminatory outputs or answers that help humans engage in illegal or unethical activities. According to Anthropic, its Constitutional AI is under constant revision, but currently draws from a range of external sources intended to provide it with broad core human values (UN Declaration of Human Rights) and follow trust and safety best practices proposed by other AI labs (Sparrow Principles).

This approach to a responsible AI garnered early investment from Alameda Research and Google, who acquired an 8% and 10% ownership respectively. In September 2023, Amazon also became a minority shareholder after announcing a strategic collaboration to advance generative AI by investing $4 billion into Anthropic, which currently has a valuation of $18 billion.

Perplexity

Perplexity AI was also founded by former OpenAI and Google employees. It is an AI-powered search engine that heavily utilises Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide comprehensive answers to user queries. In contrast with ChatGPT, Perplexity performs real-time searches of the web and uses AI to provide additional context and information, while transparently providing sources and citations so that users can evaluate and validate the accuracy of its answers.

Currently valuated at $520 million, it has attracted well-known investors in its latest funding round (including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos) who see it as a worthy contender to dethrone Google from its dominant position in the search market.

In a recent interview on the Hard Fork podcast, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas discussed their rivalry with Google. He made a bold prediction that Google will not freely release Gemini to its two billion Google Search users, given Wall Street’s reaction to any decrease in Google Ads revenue. The monetisation strategy for Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine still remains unclear, as it may have difficulty persuading users to pay $20 a month when they can use other search engines for free. Furthermore, publishers may lack the incentive to allow Perplexity and other AI companies to crawl their sites and train their LLMs using their intellectual property without a fair compensation structure and an analytics model provision that is able to track referral traffic effectively coming from AI tools.

2023 was marked by widespread fascination with the creative capabilities of generative AI and chatbots, leading to their adoption for a range of tasks including content summarisation, research, proofreading, and editing text. IBM forecasts that 2024 will be the year in which major tech platforms will enhance their services with AI while navigating a rapidly-changing and potentially uneven regulatory landscape. The pivotal question is whether the new laws governing AI will foster responsible AI development across the industry, or impede new companies from launching innovative tools due to an excess of regulatory hurdles.

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