Introduction

ChatGPT is Silicon Valley’s latest app sensation that has investors rushing to find the next big thing in generative AI, the technology that some term as the beginning of a new era in big tech. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making its presence felt in daily life for decades. However, the November launch of the conversational robot from the start-up OpenAI was a turning point in its perception by the investors as well as the general public.

Generative AI, of which ChatGPT is the perfect example, sails through oceans of data to create unique content – a poem, an image, a thousand-word essay within a matter of seconds upon a simple user request. ChatGPT has become one of the fastest growing apps and has pushed Microsoft and Google to launch projects that they thought were not yet ready for the public.

Generative AI comes at an otherwise down time for the tech sector with thousands of layoffs by the world’s biggest organizations and smaller ones that are struggling for survival. So is AI the indeed the next gold rush?

Is AI that Valuable

If one compares the change from 2020 to 2021 with the last 3 years, where AI investment has been consistent, the 2020 pandemic enhanced this growth. Consulting firms such as Delloite and McKinsey continue to support the digital transformation craze. And as AI becomes more accessible, we expect more investors to fund AI-focused/machine learning operations (MLOps) startups.

Open AI

The incredible rise of Open AI controls AI funding. This is a clear sign of the industry’s next giant! OpenAI is currently leading the pack with over $11 billion collected since its inception, while all the other organizations have received a combined funding of about $3 billion. However, all 10 of the most funded MLOps startups have received over $100 million in funding

Anthropic

The next most well-funded AI startup is Anthropic. It is founded by OpenAI’s former employees, who aim to develop more human-like and safe AI.

Open AI

Scale AI

Scale AI is a data annotation platform that offers high-quality data to train AI models. Founded in 2016, the company has raised close to $602.6 million, with the most recent investment round amassing $117 million to support 15 AI projects.

Anyscale

Anyscale is a computing platform that simplifies the development, implementation, and management of Ray applications at scale.

Inflection AI

Inflection AI allows developers to train AI models without sharing that data with anyone. The company was co-founded in 2022 by LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman and two others. Within its first year, the startup raised an impressive $225 million in one round.

Weights & Biases

Weights & Biases created a developer-first Machine Language Operations platform that offers performance visualization tools for machine learning.

Hugging Face

Hugging Face creates open-source tools using ML to build applications, such as the Transformers library that developers use to develop natural language processing apps.

OctoML

OctoML enables developers to implement ML models on any hardware without specific skillsets.

AI21 Labs

AI21 Labs created the AI21 Studio, which has language models. As of 2023, AI21 Labs has secured $118.5 million in over six rounds.

Conclusion

The ChatGPT “gold rush” can be unprecedented and expand well beyond Generative AI as the very technology itself decreases the requirement for a computer coder or designer to execute ideas. This wave of AI cane be much bigger than mobile or the cloud, and more on the scale of something such as the Industrial Revolution that changed the course of human history.