Discovery = opportunity.
After ChatGPT hit the scene, every corporate boardroom globally was buzzing with one question: how the heck do we capitalize on this AI wave?
The funny thing is, the actual AI MVPs so far were the companies that asked this question before AI was cool.
Like Microsoft and Google.
In 2019, Microsoft became “very, very worried” that it was falling behind Google in AI, so it invested $1B into OpenAI.
Yeah, that OpenAI.
The now not-so-small AI startup has taken the lead in building the most powerful AI. It kicked off in 2015 as a small non-profit by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and a crew of brainiacs to build AI that would “benefit humanity.”
Fast forward nearly a decade, Elon’s out, Sam was fired and rehired, and Microsoft shoveled another $10B into the startup.
And thanks to being OpenAI’s sugar daddy, Microsoft gets first dibs on all its new tech, which it then offers under a new label, “Copilot,” for all its enterprises in Microsoft Office.
In layman’s terms, it’s trying to make AI hip for GenX by integrating ChatGPT across all its apps like Excel and PowerPoint users (it’s kinda working).
Google is trying to do the same thing with Docs and Sheets, though its home-grown AI models like Gemini have always been worse than OpenAI’s. They’ve also received a ton of flak for models that hallucinate a lot (read: make sh*t up).
More important for Google might be Google Search.
It used to be that when you had a question, you’d hit up Google, and it would point you to the top answer. But now, AI can hand you the best answer on a silver platter. No searching needed, just asking.
And upstarts like Perplexity are racing to be Google’s Achilles’ heel by offering AI summaries for free, bypassing search results cluttered with ads and spam.
It’s a threat, sure, but Google isn’t the GOAT for nothing—they’ve built their own AI search engine that’s rolling out to a billion users by EOY.
It’s on like Donkey Kong.
Pssssst.
Don’t think we’ve forgotten about THE AI giant. You know, the one that made all your friends rich while you scrambled to recall your Robinhood password.
Nvidia.
The $3T company that builds computer chips to power AI. Big Tech is so bullish on AI and has so much cash sitting around that it’s pre-ordered hundreds of billions of dollars in Nvidia chips. Pre-ordered!
And that’s how you get the largest increase in market cap for any company in history. #NVDA.
BUT discovery = opportunity = competition.
Lots of it.
Investors see the opportunity and are spraying money into any startup that has a chance at winning big—Anthorpic, xAI, and Mistral, to name a few.
Even governments are pumping money into AI, the same tech they’re trying (and struggling) to regulate.
It’s all moving fast. So fast. So fast that things inevitably break.
Stay tuned for our take on what’s really broken in AI.
See you cool cats tomorrow,
Noah
