What is BigTech and AI

Covering AI at the intersection of the world's biggest companies.

Hey Everyone,

I’m having to pivot in 2024 to survive as an independent publisher.

This Newsletter was recently earmarked to cover AI papers & research. But unfortunately after a review of the ecosystem I discovered there are too many Creators already doing this and mostly are capable of doing it with ChatGPT and other tools that can summarize papers. Therefore my amateur journalistic skills are not very well utilized in that domain.

If you had signed up for a paid subscription based on the AI paper angle, reply to this Email if you want a full refund (there aren’t many of you). Moving forwards I have identified a niche that can be improved on Substack.

I’m going to cover all things AI related to BigTech on this publications.

BigTech and AI covers how major technology firms are integrating AI and releasing AI products or augmenting their ecosystems with AI. It is primarily concerned with companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Nvidia and so forth.

This means I will be focused on the magnificent seven, including sometimes OpenAI since it has attached itself to Microsoft. These are the companies with the biggest market cap, deepest pockets and most to lose or gain if commercial AGI is achieved.

• Google

• Apple

• Microsoft

• Facebook (Meta)

• Amazon

• Nvidia

• Tesla and so forth.

This complements my other publications on Substack and lets my audience enjoy a more tangible focus on news, summaries and insights on how some of the most powerful companies in the world are integrating Generative A.I. into their products. Some of their PR is boring but it’s also interesting in so far as major firms are learning to integrate and augment themselves with GPT technologies.

This will also sometimes include Chinese BigTech companies like ByteDance, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Pinduoduo, Huawei, BYD, Meituan and others. I do not believe their current market cap reflects their ability to develop Generative A.I. on their own terms and within China’s own particular rules.

I could just focus on America’s “magnificent seven” and still have a regular cycle of news to follow and cover. I do not currently know how often of a cadence I’ll be publishing these stories since obviously I manage multiple publications.

After research into the area, I did not feel that Substack Newsletters nor mainstream coverage does a particularly good job of covering news around BigTech and what they are planning to do in A.I. besides it just being very generic PR. I will make an effort to summarize, synthesize, combine sources, go deeper and pull and tease additional insights and share my own opinions as well.

Again I apologize if you were expecting AI papers from this Newsletter, as it simply never materialized. For that I will refer you to others:

• Davis Summarizes Papers

• NLP Newsletter, also on LinkedIn here.

• AK’s Substack and there are literally at least a dozen others who do this.

BigTech and AI

Follow and keep up to date on all things relevant to the major BigTech players and their Generative AI strategy here. Off the top of my head there are still many unanswered questions about how BigTech will focus on Generative A.I. (these are early days in 2024).

Topics I’m Thinking About in Early 2024

• How impressive will Google Gemini Ultra be?

• Will Meta’s Llama-3 be able to keep leading in open-source innovation for LLM and SLMs?

• How will Microsoft differentiate itself from OpenAI when GPT-5 launches?

• Is Microsoft’s Copilot app going places?

• How will Apple integrate Generative A.I. into its products? AppleGPT

• Will OpenAI be able to keep leading in models, research, reasoning and capabilities of foundational models and how will they become profitable?

If these topics sound vaguely interesting to you, you may choose to stick around. No worries if you want to unsubscribe too. My dedication to AI topics is unparalleled as is my interest in curating breaking news and summarizing it with my own personalized insights.

This is my 3rd year on Substack and I’m finally starting to get a vision for how I want to work (like crazy) covering the emerging technology topics that most interest me including Generative A.I., robotics, quantum computing and investing. Many of these articles will in part be behind paywalls, this is to support my time and commitment to covering these topics.

As some of my experiments in independent publishing fail I have needed to change focus and pivot. I’m sure more will as well and in the end I’ll be left with both publications that interest me the most that my audience has signaled a real product-market fit exists. I may in the end just end up with a single Newsletters, and that’s perfectly fine but for my varied interests I’ve yet to come to that conclusion. This is a sister publication of my new endeavor to cover robotics news here:

• What is OK Robot?

I am just one person, to sustain myself as a writer on Substack moving forwards in my third year I need to make a breakthrough in being supported by curious readers.

This has not happened in my first 700+ days on the platform. It’s not clear for how much longer I’ll realistically be able to keep doing this so I will be putting more of my work behind a paywall for survival reasons. While I have been self-supported for a period, I need to consider monetization options available to me in order to keep covering these topics.

BigTech is one of the Biggest Investors in Gen AI Startups

In recent times Tesla and Nvidia have become quasi-BigTech companies and in particular Nvidia invested more in Generative A.I. startups last year in 2023. So who will be the BigTech of Generative A.I.? Considering how OpenAI is tethered to Azure Cloud and Anthropic to both Google and AWS, it’s a weird moment in tech history. Here are some of the bigger funding rounds in AI lately:

1. OpenAI raised $10B

2. Anthropic raised two rounds for $6B

3. Inflection AI raised $1.3B

4. Metropolis Technologies raised $1.1B

5. Databricks raised $685M

6. xAI raised $500M (unconfirmed)

7. Aleph Alpha raised $500M

8. SandboxAQ raised $500M

9. Mistral AI raised $487M

10. Anthropic raised $450M

11. Adept AI raised $350M

12. Cohere raised $270M

13. Holistic raising $230M (unconfirmed)

14. Hugging Face raised $200M

15. Imbue raised $200M

16. AI21 Labs raised $155M

17. Enfabrica raised $125M

How BigTech Invested in AI Companies in 2023

Guest post on my A.I. Supremacy Newsletter, by Alex Irina Sandu (images).

🟢 Nvidia

Nvidia has benefited tremendously from the emergence of Gen AI as a mainstream technology and a massive increase in demand for its GPUs, which in turn drove its stock value up by 237% in 2023, with good forecasts for 2024. The company has recently announced its own family of foundation models called Nemotron and optimized for compute performance and cost effectiveness at large scale. In 2023, it has also made investments in a variety of model providers, including:

• AI21Labs, alongside Google (see above)

• Runway, together with Salesforce and Google (see above)

• Cohere, by participating in its US$270 million Series C in June

• Inflection, alongside Microsoft and Google (see above)

• Adept, alongside Microsoft (see above)

• Mistral, by participating in its EUR450M funding round in December - exert from this post - Read more.

BigTech will Enter Healthcare, Banking and Consumer Services more and more

The future of Generative A.I. and AI in general along with a wide range of other technologies including AI in healthcare, banking, education and consumer app services will be for the most part dictated by BigTech and in particular American BigTech since they are by far the most powerful in the mid 2020s.

This is why I thought it might be a good idea to form a publication that covers this specifically. Due to their support, by proxy this includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Inflection and competitors to Nvidia like AMD. I may include the occasional semiconductor focused articles if relevant to A.I. chips.

As such here are some of the companies I will like cover:

• Apple

• Google (Alphabet)

• Microsoft

• Meta (Facebook)

• Nvidia

• OpenAI

• Anthopric

• Tesla

• AMD

• Inflection

• Alibaba

• Tencent

• Huawei

• Baidu

• Google DeepMind

• xAI (as it’s directly related to Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter via Elon Musk’s own empire etc…)

If you want to support my new endeavor, please by my guest. If you are a paid subscribe to this Newsletter and want a full refund, reply to this Email.