Eventually, there will be an alternative that is just as good as O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com. They are not in a league of their own. They are just great at marketing hype, only possible alongside Microsoft.
The top one(s) to watch in AI is DeepMind (Google), Meta, Nvidia and Anthropic as they push for the foundational breakthroughs in AI. Not just LLMs.
> Are others playing their cards close to their chest and will surprise us? Will the rate of progress slow and allow for the field to stabilize with multiple companies having effectively comparable offerings?
Yes. The under hyped ones that almost no-one is looking at and will definitely surprise the industry will be Cohere.ai and Cerebras Systems. Apple Inc. may decide to enter later with their Apple Silicon hardware and will push for smaller, local and useable AI models in Macs and iPhones focusing on 'privacy'.
Hardware compute is what separates these companies and Cerebras Systems, amongst all the hype is a hardware AI startup that is going to be acquired by a large company. Anyone would want systems to cut the time to train extremely large AI models at scale to maintain their lead. I wonder who could that be...