Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia: technological sharks are launched into an all-out war for AI that promises to make blood

Just before abandoning the decade-long project to build autonomous cars, known as Project Titan since 2014, Apple purchased a promising Canadian Artificial Intelligence startup, DarwinAI. The deal, shrouded in secrecy earlier this year, signaled a sea change for the world’s second most valuable company. The Cupertino giant was one of the few that had not spent the last year presenting products and strategies with AI.

In 2024, everything changed.

It’s rare for Apple to cancel large-scale projects in which it invested millions of dollars. What this decision by CEO Tim Cook demonstrates is that the company recognized that the future has changed. The next big platform will be Artificial Intelligence, and the companies that arrive first will guarantee global dominance. Who is on the front line?

AI arms race

A Apple arrives late to a race that was in preparation for years, with no shot to start until November 2022. It was at that time that OpenAI, a non-profit organization created to ensure that the development of AI benefited Humanity, launched the ChatGPT. The conversational bot was a half-finished version of the model I was working on and the intention with the launch was to obtain data to improve the system and understand user reactions.

The impact was overwhelming and triggered what has been called an arms race in Silicon Valley. Under the leadership of Sam Altman and with the sudden success of ChatGPT, Dall-E and other products, OpenAI changed its strategy. It’s still early days, but no other company is as well positioned to dominate a future where Artificial Intelligence is part of the technological infrastructure. Not even the Microsoft, which had invested a billion dollars in OpenAI in 2019 and from then on began to have access to its technology. The Windows parent company, led by Satya Nadella, was right on the money and more than doubled its investment in the company, taking the lead with the introduction of its own bot. Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) was the beginning of a complete transformation for the giant. “We are turning the entire company towards this technology”, Nadella announced to his leadership, according to chief scientist Eric Horvitz to the New York Times. “This is a pivotal advance in the history of computing, and we will be riding the crest of that wave.”

One year later, Microsoft is the most valuable company in the world: 3 billion dollars. Apple had been the first technology company to reach this milestone.

16 kilometers from Apple’s headquarters, where the engineers picked up from Darwin are now staying, the red siren sounded earlier. A Google had been investing in AI for several years, but had opted for a cautious approach, due to the legal, social – and moral – risks of the technology. All of this slipped down the emergency chute when ChatGPT shook the market. The leadership of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, pivoted to a new acceleration strategy and made several announcements of experimental products, including the Bard bot.

The rushed launches were not without hiccups, with errors in Bard that CEO Sundar Pichai called “unfortunate.” In February, the company was forced to suspend the people imaging functionality of Gemini (Bard’s new name) after incidents of “inaccuracies.” Meanwhile, it lost the “godfather” of Artificial Intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google after spending decades developing much of the science behind AI and was concerned about the unbridled race among giants to dominate it.

“If we think of Google as a company whose goal is to make profits, it can’t just let Bing overtake Google Search,” said Hinton, quoted by the NYT.

Adam Kerpelman, professor at the McIntire School of Commerce, explained a similar view. “I’m worried about the arms race,” he said, stressing that it’s difficult to trust these big companies. “It’s nothing personal against the companies. It’s just a question of what the capitalist incentive mechanisms are.” These incentives value profit and growth over caution and safeguards, even when it comes to technology with dangerous implications.

This was precisely the discussion that took place at Meta’s headquarters. Facebook’s parent company had launched a bot a few months before ChatGPT, called BlenderBot, but it caused embarrassment with absurd responses. Then, he introduced a model aimed at scientists, Galactica, and faced similar problems – crazy answers, invented research, uselessness as a serious tool. It only lasted three days.

In response to ChatGPT, and despite the tension between those who wanted to move quickly and those who wanted to be cautious, Meta decided to launch its model, LLaMA. A second version, Llama 2, became available last summer, when it became clear that Zuckerberg had set aside his grand metaverse vision and replaced it with an equally artificial but far more profitable horizon.

This is exactly what is being proven with the remarkable rise of Nvidia, one of the companies that has gained the most value in the new era. “Accelerated computing and generative AI have reached an inflection point,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in the latest earnings call. “Demand is rising across the world across companies, industries and nations.” Profits soared 580% in 2023 as demand exploded for its graphics processing units (GPU) that power large language models, and shares gained 239%.

There are other names emerging almost every day in this great race. A Anthropic is one of the hottest, after having raised 7.3 billion in funding in 2023 – with Amazon and Google included. CB Insights lists 45 companies in the AI ​​segment with capitalization greater than 3 million dollars, with Tesla, IBM, Palantir, Mobileye and Dynatrace in addition to the other ‘big tech’ ones.

It’s a new gold fever that’s spreading faster than regulators can act. For Gry Hasselbalch, one of Europe’s leading data and ethics experts, who is working with the European Commission, this rush of big companies led by ambitious CEOs is dangerous. “It should be up to the public to decide how AI, such a transformative technology, should be implemented and adopted in our society,” she considered. “It should not depend on the whims of a few people who decide how Humanity will evolve and how AI will be incorporated into our daily lives.”