This appendix lists many popular generative AI tools available at the time of writing. I expect some parts of the AI market to organize as an oligopoly, meaning that there will be a few key players instead of a multitude. This will be especially true of companies that build foundation models, as model training incurs high one-off costs that few companies will be able to afford. So, the market of foundation models will become similar to the cloud computing market, which is dominated by three main competitors.
Furthermore, I expect convergence in terms of models’ capabilities, as different foundation models are becoming increasingly similar. There also seems to be a tendency toward building multimodal AI, so you may not need to use different models to process text, images, and video.
In other cases, such as lighter AI apps (e.g., simple wrappers around LLMs) or smaller specialized AI models, we may observe a multitude of competitors. This market may become similar to fitness apps, in which there are thousands of options to choose from.
General-purpose conversational AI
Let’s first have a look at the market for general-purpose AI chatbots, categorized into customer-facing apps, proprietary foundation models, and open source foundation models.