Emerge’s 2024 Story of the Year: The Race to Rule AI

The rise of OpenAI to digital fame reads like a Silicon Valley soap theater. After Sam Altman’s dramatic return in 2024, the business became a cautious non-profit organization with a$ 157 billion valuation. The company is on track to bring in$ 11.6 billion in revenue with a$ 13 billion investment from Microsoft and a deal to power Apple iPhones.

For all the other jerks who are trying to enter the Artificial business, a win-win situation? Scarcely.

billions of dollars were invested in dozens of worthwhile competitors around the world, including Beijing’s Moonshot AI and Paris-based Mistral, as the money for AI continued to surge to tsunami proportions throughout 2024.

During the last week of November alone, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI pocketed$ 4 and$ 5 billion respectively. Investors are spreading their bets among a field of quick-witted, thirsty competitors, and anything that ends in AI could be the next great thing, especially given OpenAI’s delays, including Sora, its rumored next GPT model.

It seems like years since ChatGPT’s revolutionary chatbot, with which users may communicate as quickly as they could talk to a friend, first appeared. ( The robot added talk in September 2024 after it was launched in November 2022.) It almost immediately made Google seek appear outdated, something the elderly still use. It’s probably the first thing a Gen Z thinks about when someone says” AI” in modern times.

Following the increase of GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, the firm that debuted its bidirectional GPT-4o in May with an extraordinary 88.7 % report on the MMLU standard, pushing the boundaries of AI skills in 2024. By September, its new o1 model—which is supposed to handle complex reasoning—raised the bar again, achieving 83.3 % accuracy on International Mathematics Olympiad questions—a massive leap from GPT-4o’s 13.4 %.

With over 200 million weekly active users, OpenAI’s influence ran so deep that Google, deep in the throes of the Innovator’s Dilemma, suddenly began to fear for its$ 160 billion search business.

But money and fame don’t maintain a happy ending, particularly in technology. People remember the Blackberry?

Google is all about natural power—but individuals love its chatting chatbots

Google definitely isn’t going the way of the Blackberry any time soon. Besides, it’s not like it was caught with its trousers down. OpenAI was launched in December, 2015 and two months later, the search giant unveiled its new Gemini Ultra foundational design, with the capacity to practice 2 million tokens of context—making OpenAI’s GPT-4 search light weight. Google’s AI is so important that CEO Sundar Pichai announced the firm is switching from wireless to an” AI-first” plan.

Not a minute too soon, either way: The move to Gemini increased Google One’s recognition to over 100 million monthly subscribers 24 hours after its release.

Google is not just flexing its technical muscles; ChatGPT is also commonly used, but Google may be on a professional note. Its basic model also powers the platform NotebookLM, which was created in the first place to aid people handling large amounts of data and information on large amounts of files, and its RAG, small for “retrieval mixed generation” platform. Prior to an update that altered how people used RAG types, the solution didn’t make a significant impact. Welcome, Google’s audio generating.

With a fairly effective Reddit community, intriguing social experiments, and even some company applications to observe, that function alone was sufficient to raise the model’s popularity.

” I think we’ve learned a lot in the last year, what is really resonating with persons, what is really important, how they’re using it every day”, Raiza Martin, a product manager at Google Labs, told .

However, OpenAI has given us a message setting to talk to, still keeps its 128k key perspective glass, and under legal threat, removed its horny Scarlett Johanson voice. The Gemini portfolio has been important for Google’s excellent performance. Since January 2023, its share price doubled, reaching an Mun on July 10, 2024.

Anthropic: ethics + power = huge income

Smaller than Google, but perhaps as essential in terms of its role in the growth of AI bots this year is San Francisco-based Anthropic. Founded by previous OpenAI experts, Anthropic emerged as OpenAI’s most formidable opponent in 2024, turning heads with violent rise and deep-pocketed sponsors.

The conflict between ChatGPT and Claude, Anthropic’s collection of large language concepts, is the equivalent of the Cold War in AI society. When one company releases a function, the other quickly reacts. The area is constantly trying to decide which model is the best, and the two concepts are constantly competing for the top spot in the LLM Arena.

Anthropic’s earnings grew over 1, 000 % this year after the release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June, with a big part powered by third-party API people. Anthropic’s increase mirrors the first days of OpenAI, but with an even steeper path.

And the funds continue to flow in. Amazon has poured$ 8 billion into the startup, while Google agreed to invest up to$ 2 billion. These cash injections were likely strategic bets from technology companies looking to counteract OpenAI’s supremacy, and they were a direct result of a proxy war between cloud computing services, with Microsoft supporting OpenAI to gain Azure and Amazon supporting Claude to gain AWS. While Microsoft and Amazon essentially sell the spades, anthropopic and OpenAI mine the golden.

Anthropic’s victory is not just due to its models ‘ value. Ultimately, the company pushes for a broader change in the AI environment. While OpenAI vowed to win back customers, Anthropic concentrated on specific models that valued safety, betting that enterprise customers may pay premium rates for specific solutions.

Mistral AI: making Europe related

European business Mistral AI in Europe raised eyebrows after securing$ 1 billion in funding and a$ 6 billion assessment in June. Its open-source versions are more affordable than GPT-4’s features. To place this in perspective, this means, according to estimates by Trending Topics, that” Mistral AI is for €105m per employee”, making it the most important business in European history.

A recent upgrade called” Le Chat”, is being positioned as Mistral’s ChatGPT killer. It is basically free, offering everything ChatGPT does. It provides good outputs, handles code, generates images, supports agents and browses the web in real time.

And Mistral is only just beginning, with a new office in Palo Alto, California and a planned expansion into the United States.

China: proving sanctions cannot stop innovation

Chinese firms aren’t just copying anymore—they’re innovating. Even with a major embargo imposed by the United States in an attempt to stifle innovation, companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Baichuan AI, backed by massive government support, are developing models tailored for emerging markets in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. A parallel AI ecosystem that rivals anything created in San Francisco is being created by them.

Huawei, the massive telecom giant supported by the state, for example, released its own OS and is embedding it into its lineup of smartphones and home devices, creating a fully functional ecosystem. The new Deepseek has surpassed OpenAI’s reasoning model o1, and Baidu’s Ernie exceeded 100 million users in December 2023 and surpassed 200 million in April 2024 as a Chinese model, Yi Lightning defeats GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the LLM Arena.

According to the World Economic Forum, China’s AI market is estimated to top$ 61 billion next year with VCs pouring over$ 120 billion into AI ecosystems.

Meta: the best redemption arc in the tech industry

In this story, Meta plays the good guy, whether you believe it or not. While competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic fought over market share with expensive, locked-down models, Mark Zuckerberg’s company took a different route: open sourcing its technology.

Llama 3.2, released in September, showcases just how far Meta’s open-source strategy has come. The model processes both text and images, powers everything from augmented reality to visual search engines, and allows Meta to collaborate with U.S. government agencies to use its model for national security applications.

And beyond government and corporations, the Llama-powered Meta AI chatbot is a pretty promising ChatGPT competitor. The chatbot, which has recently been expanded into dozens of countries, can generate images of comparable or even better quality than Dall-e 3 and even animate them ( which ChatGPT cannot ), search the web, perform coding tasks, and imagine scenes on the spot. Beyond that, Meta has other generative AI models for audio generation, video editing, segmentation, drawing animation, and more

With Llama 4 around the corner in 2025, promising even better handling of text, voice, and images, Meta’s betting that open beats closed every time.

The numbers back up Zuckerberg’s gamble. Meta AI, the company’s answer to ChatGPT, racked up 500 million monthly users, with India leading the charge. In September alone, over a million advertisers jumped on Meta’s AI bandwagon, producing 15 million AI-generated ads. The company’s revenue shot up 18.9 % year-over-year to hit$ 40.6 billion in Q3, with ad impressions climbing 7 % while prices rose 11 %.

All this AI goodwill doesn’t come cheap. This year, Meta’s dumping$ 38 billion into capital expenditures, primarily on AI research and the hardware needed to support it. That includes cramming its data centers with 350, 000 of Nvidia’s prized H100 AI chips by year’s end. But Zuckerberg’s playing the long game. By partnering with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to host Llama models, Meta is creating an ecosystem that could influence how AI technology is spread and who becomes wealthy from it.

Not bad for a business that lost almost 75 % of its value when it first began to concentrate on the “metaverse” and has since grown by 600 % with the addition of artificial intelligence as its core business model.

Diversity is key

Is OpenAI still in control of the top echelon? Technically, maybe. At least it is the most recognizable—and valuable—A I startup in the scene. But the hill itself has changed. The race isn’t about raw power anymore—it’s about trust, accessibility, and real-world impact, and a few of these areas, notably trust and safety, are a bit murky right now for Sam Altman’s unicorn

OpenAI’s early lead has evolved into a complex web of specialized players, each carving out their own niches. Some focus on consumer applications, others on enterprise solutions, and a few brave ones tackle the fundamental research that could unlock AGI.

Sam Altman seems very optimistic that OpenAI will reach AGI next year, which would put OpenAI on top of the hill for probably a long, long time if, and this is as “if” as it can get, they succeed.

However, other very respected and talented experts, like Meta’s chief of AI research Yan LeCun, believe such achievement is accomplishable in around 10 years or so. Depending on who your favorite rockstar is, whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic, it’s up to you.

That said, the real winner of 2024’s AI race is the users. Competition drives innovation, but it also forces companies to address concerns about safety, privacy, and accessibility. This is why the Amodei brothers left OpenAI to start Anthropic, and Ilya Sutskeyver left Safe Superintelligence. This is why Huawei created its own mobile operating system and used domestic technology to create one of the year’s best smartphones, why developers create unique, superior versions of the most well-liked AI models, and why AI as a technology has become a social phenomenon in recent years.

As these AI titans battle for supremacy, they’re building tools that transform everything from how we work to how we create and communicate.

And that’ one AI to rule them all’? Perhaps that was the incorrect question at the beginning. In 2025’s AI landscape, diversity will likely play an important role. And that might be exactly what we require.