OpenAI may have dominated the headlines, but a more low-profile crop of startups is emerging around the world.
Artificial intelligence is developing at a dizzying pace, with technologies capable of everything from composing pop songs to writing code. Although it is still in its infancy— even the best chatbots can only fabricate things— its impact on humanity is good, bad, and inevitable.
The wave of innovation has brought in more funding, with tens of billions of dollars invested in AI companies in just the first half of the year. Here are the 10 largest, most important, and best-funded startups to watch in 2024, along with 6 of the most significant up-and-coming players in the industry.
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OpenAI
Valuation: $86 billion
OpenAI launched the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, showcasing the potential of artificial intelligence to the world. Since then, the company has been pushing the boundaries of technology. The software it has developed can generate impressively realistic videos, and its AI can answer users' questions in near real-time with a human voice. (These products have not yet been released to the general audience.)OpenAI also provided one of the most fascinating tech dramas in modern history: the CEO Sam Altman was fired in November, but was brought back within five days, a series of events that has made some artificial intelligence safety advocates uneasy.
Anthropic
Valuation: $18.2 billion
Founded by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic is OpenAI's main competitor in the field of large language models. Large language model technology has driven the most dazzling artificial intelligence achievements of the current era.
This startup has approached OpenAI in terms of performance and substantial funding from companies such as Google under Alphabet Inc. and Amazon. Anthropic claims that its latest model outperforms OpenAI in key assessments such as coding and text-based reasoning. The company focuses on building tools for businesses and has expanded its corporate business to include clients such as Bridgewater Associates, Salesforce, and Pfizer.
Led by an unusual sibling team, with President Daniela Amodei, the company has always emphasized its focus on safety, recently publishing some research results that delve into the actual workings of generative artificial intelligence, which remains a mystery at present.
Suno
Valuation: $500 millionGive Suno a command—say, "Sing me a reggae ballad about anchovies on pizza"—and its software will execute, composing a surprisingly complex, human-sounding song complete with vocals and rhyming lyrics in just a few seconds.
Suno is a leading new artificial intelligence startup dedicated to developing tools to automate the music production process. Its technological innovation has made it popular with users and, predictably, has incited the wrath of the music industry. Generative AI must be trained on vast amounts of data, which in this case means Suno has absorbed a plethora of songs.
In June of this year, the world's largest record company sued Suno and its competitor Udio, alleging that their training data included a large number of copyrighted recordings, sparking a potentially landmark case for the AI industry.
Perplexity
Valuation: $1 billion
Founded in 2022, Perplexity has quickly grown from a small startup to one of the most watched startups in Silicon Valley, sparking fierce controversy along the way. The company is hailed as a disruptor to Google, offering an AI-powered search engine and is currently in the late stages of negotiations for new financing at a valuation of $3 billion, making this startup a paragon of AI tools that rethink basic internet services like search.
Perplexity's investors include tech heavyweights such as Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, and Nvidia. The company's product offers conversational search results and news summaries, which has also alarmed the publishing industry, accused of plagiarism, and sparked concerns about writers' works potentially being incorporated into AI products that occupy a large amount of traffic.
MistralValuation: $6 billion
The most eye-catching artificial intelligence companies and the most well-known models usually come from the United States or China: Mistral is an exception. This Paris-based startup, founded last year by French alumni from Google DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc., has released a series of popular large language models, mainly open-source technology, as well as developer tools, chatbots (Le Chat), and artificial intelligence programming products (Codestral).
All of this is part of Mistral's propaganda to become an independent alternative to Silicon Valley—despite the startup also signing agreements with American tech giants such as Microsoft Corporation and IBM Corporation, in hopes of gaining more attention across the Atlantic.
xAI
Valuation: $24 billion
Earlier this year, Elon Musk's new startup raised billions of dollars, promising to develop a "rebellious" anti-woke chatbot. This bot, named Grok, is trained on posts from X (formerly known as Twitter's website) and is currently available to paid users of the network.
"We want to be the most interesting artificial intelligence," Musk said at a conference earlier this year. "If we're going to die, at least we should die laughing." This is a personal issue for Musk, who was a co-founder of OpenAI and had a fierce dispute with this startup, including a lawsuit, which he later dropped. Next, xAI will use its billions of dollars in funding to develop a supercomputer facility in Memphis.
ScaleValuation: $13.8 billion
The output quality of an artificial intelligence system is entirely dependent on the data it consumes. Scale's platform uses a combination of software and human labor to clean up massive amounts of data, filtering and labeling images, texts, and audio that support large language models. In addition to the U.S. Department of Defense, the startup's clients also include AI giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta. This seemingly insatiable demand for data has made Scale one of the world's highest-valued artificial intelligence startups.
Cohere
Valuation: $5.5 billion
Cohere does not have a cool consumer chatbot that can discuss the weather or write poetry. The company almost exclusively develops large language models for its enterprise clients, which include Salesforce Inc. and Accenture.
Chief Executive Officer Aidan Gomez is an AI celebrity, one of the former Google engineers who co-authored the groundbreaking 2017 AI paper "Attention Is All You Need," which helped usher in the current era of artificial intelligence.
Cohere's investors include well-known companies such as Nvidia Corp. and Oracle Corp. The company's latest model, Command R+, is cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo. Although it performs poorly in raw capabilities, Cohere states that it is more suitable for certain business-centric tasks.
CoreWeave (Note: The original text seems to be cut off here, so I can't provide a translation for CoreWeave.)Valuation: $19 billion
No one has enough graphics processing units to complete all the artificial intelligence work they want to do, whether it's OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. CoreWeave is a cloud computing service provider that offers chip leasing services to a new generation of companies in urgent need of capacity.
It is reported that even Microsoft has signed an agreement with CoreWeave to obtain additional GPUs. CoreWeave doubled its valuation in April, becoming one of the most valuable startups in the United States with billions of dollars in debt and equity. The company, which was previously focused on bitcoin mining, has now made a profitable transformation.
ElevenLabs
Valuation: $1.1 billion
In a crucial year for U.S. elections, ElevenLabs' technology has amazed people. The company is at the forefront of voice cloning artificial intelligence, and its software can replicate human voices, convert text into human speech, and translate speech from one language to another.
This technology is used by AI video startups (such as HeyGen and Captions) and individuals. For example, Virginia state legislator Jennifer Wexton replicated her voice to help her communicate after being affected by a neurological disease that impaired her speech ability. Not all use cases are altruistic. Earlier this year, ElevenLabs banned a user who forged an audio of U.S. President Joe Biden urging people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary.
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