Who’s ahead in the AI arms race — Microsoft? Google? Meta?

Earlier this week, Google unveiled Gemini 2.0 — the second generation of its flagship artificial intelligence technology. Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out a little over two years ago, big tech companies have poured billions into developing their own AI products; that includes Google, Microsoft and Meta, just to name a few.

Earlier this month, OpenAI announced a new premium subscription tier aimed at ChatGPT superusers. For $200 a month, you basically get unfettered access to the latest and greatest version of their large language model.

Amin Ahmad at the enterprise AI firm Vectara is an early subscriber and he’s impressed by it’s coding skills.

“It can write complete programs for me that would have taken a few days, or let’s say I would have handed off to an intern in the past, and it does them for me in a few minutes,” he said.

But Ahmad said that even with its latest generation of products, the early technological lead OpenAI had is fading.

Google, Meta and other companies have released AI models that perform just as well, if not better, on many industry benchmarks.

“So the problem I think for OpenAI is that, you know, the competition has gotten really, really good,” said Ahmad. “There’s many companies, and the models are just getting better by the day, and they’re closing the gap.”

Open’s AI’s biggest investor, Microsoft, is the early leader when it comes to selling AI programs to other businesses.

By integrating AI into products like Word and Excel, Microsoft has leveraged its ubiquity in the American workplace, said Dan Ives at the investment firm Wedbush.

“Enterprises rely and look at the foundation of Microsoft like bread and water for a typical person, and that’s why they’ve benefited,” he said.

The wild card in the AI arms race so far has been Meta and its open source AI system, Llama.

“They’re kind of trying to get as many people or developers as possible onto their ecosystem, essentially giving the platform away for free before they actually start monetizing,” said Angelo Zino, a tech analyst with CFRA.

Of course the biggest monetizer in AI so far is Nvidia. But remember, they don’t actually make the robots — just the chips that power them.