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It’s not easy seeing the AI bigger picture, but we’re getting there
As well as being an interesting exercise in itself, helping society understand what is going on in sectors like AI and the implications for our future is part of my job description as an academic who teaches innovation.
AI is a highly stratified industry, starting from a large base made up mainly of infrastructure created by Nvidia and its chips used for the large data centers where the training and operation of the models is carried out. Next there are a series of companies, ranging from OpenAI — which launched the AI era — to all those trying to compete with it to develop their own models: in the United States, Big Tech players like Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc.; along with more recent arrivals such as Anthropic, Perplexity and the like.
In China, where there are restrictions on access to the most advanced chips, these companies are also divided between the classic Big Tech companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent and new competitors such as DeepSeek, Stepfun, ModelBest, Zhipu and Infinigence.ai. The difference? In China, the government, faced with the need to progress more quickly, is helping development through open source, or at least, a greater degree of openness, which while not total (link in Spanish), does enable more cooperation and cross-fertilization.
