AI land grab

There's an AI land grab going on at the moment. Companies are scrambling to stake their claim of the new AI-centric future; they only get one chance to do this because once the industry settles, there won't be much room for new major players. It's very exciting to see how things are unfolding, as organisations roll out new models, compete for talent, and do their best to secure the latest Nvidia chips.

Even with the rapid expansion of the sector, there is some consolidation happening. For example, Nvidia taking stakes in Intel and OpenAI, and Microsoft incorporating ChatGPT and Anthropic into its services. Yesterday, rumours surfaced that Meta plans to use Google's Gemini to assist in their ad targeting.

The partnership makes sense given that Meta signed a major six-year cloud computing deal with Google Cloud last month, valued at more than $10 billion. Meta seems to be admitting that its own AI, Llama, is lagging behind that of Google. Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is pushing hard to ensure that future versions of Llama are industry leading - from hiring the best in the industry to spending over $100 billion a year on computing power.

About two years ago, the Alphabet share price slumped because the market assumed that it had already lost the AI wars. Remember when Gemini's picture generator was trying to be politically correct, and created images with dark-skinned Nazis? A lot has happened since then, and Google is solidly in the mix as the best in the AI industry.