The major AI companies do not seem to have this advantage. If I use OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and you use Anthropic’s Claude, we still can easily communicate with each other – through other media. It is even possible to imagine linking one service to the other, using text, through a third-party intermediary.
A small number of AI services, possibly even a single one, likely will end up better than the others for a wide variety of purposes. Such companies might buy the best hardware, hire the best talent and manage their brands relatively well. But they will face competition from other companies offering lesser (but still good) services at a lower price.
When it comes to Large Language Models, there is already a proliferation of services, with Baidu, Google and Anthropic products due in the market. The market for AI image generation is more crowded yet.
In economic terms, the dominant AI company might turn out to be something like Salesforce. Salesforce is a major seller of business and institutional software, and its products are extremely popular.
Yet the valuation of the company, as of this writing, is about US$170 billion. That’s hardly chump change, but it does not come close to the US$1 trillion valuations elsewhere in the tech sector.
OpenAI, a current market leader, has received a private valuation of US$29 billion. Again, that’s not a reason to feel sorry for anyone – but there are plenty of companies you might not have heard of that are worth far more. AbbVie, a biopharmaceutical corporation, has a valuation of about US$271 billion, almost 10 times higher than OpenAI’s.
