AI Battle Royale

The AI landscape seemed relatively simple. ChatGPT and later Claude, and Gemini were dominating conversations.

Now? It’s seems a full-blown AI Battle Royale. The news is full with self proclaimed contenders. Everybody wants a slice of this pie.

Deepseek, Kimi, Meta, Perplexity, and even Elon Musk’s Grok are new contenders. And let’s be honest, that list I made is not exhaustive. New players seem to emerge daily, making it a challenge for me to keep track of them all.

It’s enough to make me wish for an AI to manage all these AI providers!

Where is the genuine innovation?

Which AI models are future fossils?

Are we witnessing any genuine innovation, or simply a Cambrian explosion of similar technologies? While advancements in reasoning models are certainly exciting, it could be the only news we get. Anyway, to me a sense of déjà vu lingers.

Many of these feel like variations on a theme. Focusing on variations of chatbot functionality. That made me think of the Cambrian explosion.

The Cambrian period saw an incredible diversification of body plans, with many experimental forms appearing and then disappearing. Are these new AI models, in their various forms, analogous to those early Cambrian creatures? Testing the limits of whats possible? Or are they evolutionary dead ends, destined to become the fossil record of the AI age?

What makes it fun for me is that the analogy extends even further. Just as many Cambrian creatures left behind only fossilized remains, will these current AI models eventually become the relics of a bygone era? Will they be overtaken by radically different approaches? Leaving only traces of their existence in the codebases and datasets of tomorrow? Future Tech Debt?

Monopoly

Despite this feeling of witnessing very small incremental progress, the sheer number of competitors could also be seen as a positive development. The more players in the Battle Royale arena, the better the chances of delaying, if not preventing, a potential monopoly.

A diverse Cambrian ecosystem fosters competition. Next to that, there are many people hosting their own LLMs. This is a fantastic democratization of technology. Driven by open-source initiatives and repurposed mining rigs, it delivers increasingly affordable access. These people and their experiments are crucial for long-term progress. The more, the better.

Dot.com bubble?

However, a nagging question remains. This frenzied activity echoes the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Back then, countless “internet companies” sprung up, each promising to revolutionize the world. Ultimately, only a few survived.

Is the current AI landscape destined for a similar fate? Will we see a single dominant player emerge from this Battle Royale, consolidating power and shaping the future of AI? Or will the diverse ecosystem persist, fostering a more balanced and innovative landscape?

To close off

I’m seeing a lot of wheels being re-invented, but where’s the car? Where’s the truly transformative application that leverages the power of these LLMs? Are we just destined for an endless parade of chatbots, or will something truly groundbreaking emerge from this crowded field? I love the reasoning engine Atlas that Salesforce has, as that is a very concentrated and concrete tool with a clear purpose.

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The next question for me then becomes: what are the driving forces behind this AI Cambrian explosion? Who will become tomorrow’s fossil? What horse do you bet on now?