Parmy Olson, Columnist

The Tech Giants Are Eating the Chatbot Kings

Open-source AI firms are meanwhile offering a better alternative to Silicon Valley.

April 2, 2024 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

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When ChatGPT hit the market in November 2022, it sparked a battle for a new product category known as foundation models. These artificial intelligence systems, which generate text and images, cost tens of millions of dollars in computing power to build, and only a few companies have the resources and talent to create them.

In March, one of them was swallowed up by Microsoft Corp. — and much more quickly than anyone expected. After raising more than $1.5 billion from investors, 70 staff from Inflection transferred to Microsoft, which is paying the company $650 million in licensing fees in a deal designed to make investors whole.