For a few days, AI chip giant Nvidia sat on the throne as the world’s biggest company, but behind its tremendous success lies the question of whether new entrants can stake their claim in the field of artificial intelligence.
Nvidia, which makes processors that are the only option for training the large language models of generative AI, is now the newest member of Big Tech, and its gains in the stock market have lifted the entire sector.
Even other tech giants on Wall Street are following in Nvidia’s footsteps, with stocks of Oracle, Broadcom, HP and several others seeing their valuations soar despite occasional earnings fluctuations.
Amid sips of champagne, startups attracting the attention of Silicon Valley venture capitalists are being asked to innovate — but without a clear indication of where the next chapter of AI will be written.
Doubts remain over what exactly will be left for companies that are not existing model builders when it comes to generative AI, a field dominated by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Most people agree that competing directly with them would probably be a fool’s errand.
“I don’t think there’s a good opportunity right now to start a foundational AI company,” said Mike Meyer, founder and CEO of tech firm QUIK, at the Collision Technology Conference in Toronto.
Some have attempted to build applications that use or emulate the strengths of existing large models, but are being rebuffed by the biggest players in Silicon Valley.
“What bothers me is that people are not distinguishing between applications that are going to be lethal as models advance in their capabilities, and those that are actually adding value and will still be around 10 years from now,” said venture capital veteran Vinod Khosla.
– ‘will not work’ –
The tough-talking Khosla is one of OpenAI’s early investors.
“Grammarly won’t be able to keep up,” Khosla predicted of spelling and grammar checking apps and others like it.
These companies, which only put out a “thin layer” of information about what their AI models have to offer, will be ruined, he said.
Chip design is one area in which AI requires more specialized processors that offer highly specialized powers, Khosla said.
“If you look at the history of chips, we’ve mostly focused on simple chips,” Rebecca Parsons, chief technology officer at tech consultancy ThoughtWorks, told AFP.
Providing more specialized processing for the many demands of AI is an opportunity that Groq has seized. Groq is a startup that has built chips for deploying AI as opposed to training or inference – which is the specialty of Nvidia’s world-dominating GPUs.
Grok CEO Jonathan Ross told AFP that Nvidia won’t be the best at everything, even if they are undisputed for generative AI training.
He said, “Nvidia and (its CEO) Jensen Huang are like Michael Jordan … the greatest player ever in basketball. But the assumption is baseball, and we try to forget about the time Michael Jordan tried to play baseball and wasn’t very good at it.”
Another opportunity will come from highly specialized AI, providing expertise and insights based on proprietary data that will not be co-opted by greedy big tech.
“Open AI and Google are not going to create a structural engineer. They’re not going to create a product like a primary care physician or a mental health therapist,” Khosla said.
Profiting from highly specific data is the basis of Cohere, another of Silicon Valley’s most popular startups, which offers tailor-made models to businesses worried about AI getting out of their control.
“Enterprises are skeptical of technology and they’re risk averse, so we need to earn their trust and prove to them that there is a way to adopt this technology that is reliable, trustworthy and secure,” Cohair chief executive Aidan Gomez told AFP.
When he was just 20 years old and working at Google, Gomez co-authored the landmark paper “Attention Is All You Need,” in which he introduced Transformers, the architecture behind popular large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.
The company has received funding from Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures and has a valuation in the billions of dollars.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
