Microsoft -> OpenAI (& Inflection AI) Google -> Gemini (and a bit of Anthropic) Amazon -> Anthropic Meta -> Llama
Is big tech good for the startup ecosystem, or are they monopolies eating everything (or both?). To be fair to Google and Meta they came up with a lot of the stuff in the first place, and aren't just buying the competition.
Notable contributions: Nvidia for, well, (gestures at everything), Google for discovering (inventing?) transformers, being early advocates of ML, authoring tensorflow, Meta for Torch and open sourcing Llama, Microsoft for investing billions in OpenAI early on and keeping the hype alive. The last one is a reach, I'm sure Microsoft Research did some cool things I'm unaware of.