10 AI Companies to Watch

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Photo credit: SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS

A recent article by Bloomberg listed rising 50 companies that are using artificial intelligence to solve various problems and create competitive advantage in their respective field of expertise.

These companies are not only creating innovative products and services, but also attracting huge investments and valuations.

Apart from the more notable iconic tech giants, namely, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and more recently in the spotlight, NVIDIA, we’ve distilled rising generative AI companies based on its capital valuation offering transformative technology that are creating new markets and opportunities across various industries with their cutting-edge technological products and services and unique selling proposition (USP) .

Read through till the end to consider the insights and perspective on the current and future prospects of the global AI industry.

Here is an overview of the Top 10 rising stars and what they do. :

1. Cognizant

Cognizant is a company that provides IT consulting and outsourcing services, including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and digital transformation.

It helps clients in various industries such as banking, healthcare, retail, and media to leverage technology to improve their operations, innovation, and customer satisfaction.

Cognizant was founded in 1994 as a division of Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, a provider of business information services. It became an independent company in 1998 and went public in 1999. It has more than 300,000 employees and serves clients in over 80 countries.

It has a market capitalization of $38 billion.

2. OpenAI

This is one of the most prominent AI research labs in the world, founded by a group of tech luminaries such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman.

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence is used for good and can benefit humanity as a whole. One of its most famous products are Chat GPT-3 and an upgraded version Chat GPT-4, two massive language models that can generate coherent texts from any given prompt.

OpenAI also creates other generative AI tools, such as DALL-E and DALL-E 2, which can produce images from text descriptions, and Codex, which can write code from natural language instructions.

OpenAI has valuation at more than $27 billion.

3. Zymergen

Zymergen is a company that uses artificial intelligence and biotechnology to engineer new materials and products from microbes.

It combines advanced robotics, machine learning, genomics, and fermentation to design, test, and optimize novel biological molecules at scale. It then uses these molecules to create high-performance materials such as films, coatings, adhesives, and electronics.

Zymergen was founded in 2013 by Joshua Hoffman, Zach Serber, and Jed Dean, who saw an opportunity to harness the power of biology and computation to create new solutions for various industries.

It has a valuation of $3 billion.

4. DeepMind

This is a company that develops artificial intelligence systems that can master complex tasks across various domains, such as games, science, health care and art.

DeepMind’s products use deep learning, reinforcement learning and neuroscience-inspired algorithms to learn from data and feedback.

 One of its most famous products is AlphaGo, an AI system that defeated the world champion of Go in 2016.

DeepMind was founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, who shared a passion for creating artificial intelligence that can solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.

In 2014, it was acquired by Google for $500 million, becoming part of its parent company Alphabet Inc.

DeepMind has a valuation of $2 billion.

5. Improbable

Improbable is a company that uses distributed simulation to create a platform that can model complex systems and scenarios at scale.

It can simulate physical environments, social interactions, economic behaviours, and strategic outcomes.

It can also create immersive virtual worlds for gaming and entertainment. It is intended to help organizations and individuals to understand the consequences of their actions and decisions.

Improbable was founded in 2012 by Herman Narula, Rob Whitehead, and Peter Lipka, who were passionate about creating realistic simulations that can capture the richness and diversity of reality.

Improbable has a valuation of $2 billion.

Picture a virtual simulation of a landscape.
Photo credit: Keefe Tay

6. Anthropic

Anthropic’s main product is Claude, a natural language processing and generation platform that can generate realistic and diverse text from natural language prompts.

It is based on the Stable Diffusion model, which was co-created by Anthropic and Runway in 2021. The model uses a novel technique called diffusion, which reverses the process of image generation and starts from a noisy image and gradually refines it until it matches the text description.

It is also committed to fostering a culture of transparency, collaboration, and diversity within the AI community. It operates as a public-benefit corporation, which means that it prioritizes social and environmental impact over profit.

Anthropic has a valuation of $1.2 billion.

7. Stability AI

Stability AI is a company that uses artificial intelligence to create a text-to-image platform that can generate realistic and diverse images from natural language prompts.

It is based on the Stable Diffusion model, which was co-created by Stability AI and Runway in 2021.

The model uses a novel technique called diffusion, which reverses the process of image generation and starts from a noisy image and gradually refines it until it matches the text description.

Stability AI was founded in 2020 by James Smith, who was a former researcher at DeepMind and a PhD student at Oxford University.

It has a valuation of $1 billion.

8. Vicarious

Vicarious is a company that aims to create general artificial intelligence that can mimic human intelligence and perform any task across any domain.

It is inspired by the principles of neuroscience and cognitive science and uses a novel approach called Recursive Cortical Network (RCN) to model the human brain. RCN can learn from small amounts of data, generalize to new situations, and explain its reasoning.

Vicarious was founded in 2010 by Dileep George, Scott Phoenix, and D. Scott Brown, who were fascinated by the challenge of building artificial intelligence that can rival human intelligence.

It has a valuation of $500 million.

9. Hyperlink InfoSystem

Hyperlink InfoSystem is a company that offers artificial intelligence solutions for various domains such as healthcare, education, e-commerce, and gaming.

It uses machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and chatbots to create customised applications that can enhance user experience, improve business efficiency, and generate insights.

Hyperlink InfoSystem was founded in 2011 by Harnil Oza, who started as a freelance web developer and later expanded his services to mobile app development.

It has a valuation of $500 million.

10. Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a company that develops open-source natural language processing libraries and tools for researchers and developers.

It is best known for its Transformers library, which provides easy access to hundreds of pre-trained natural language models such as GPT-4, BERT, and T5.

Hugging Face’s platform also includes Hugging Face Spaces, a web app that lets users share and explore natural language projects; Hugging Face Hub, a repository that hosts natural language models and datasets; and Hugging Face Inference API, a service that lets users run natural language models on the cloud.

Hugging Face was founded in 2016 by Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, who started as a chatbot company and later pivoted to a natural language processing platform.

It has a valuation of $400 million.

Here’s the thing.

The AI industry is booming, with more than $52 billion invested in AI startups in 2022, and more than 10,000 AI startups operating globally.

It is expected to grow exponentially as AI open source becomes available to the public under open-source licenses.

It is also estimated that the total market capitalization of data centers in the world today is somewhere between USD 200 billion and USD 300 billion, depending on the definition and methodology used. 

It is expected to have a linear growth as accelerated computing replaces general purpose computing in the age of AI as data centers enhances its versatility and utility.

The AI industry is diverse, with startups tackling various problems and opportunities across different domains such as health care, education, entertainment, and defense.

The AI industry is innovative, with startups using cutting-edge technologies such as generative AI, diffusion models, and computer vision to create novel products and services that can enhance human capabilities and experiences.

The AI industry is competitive, with startups facing challenges such as data scarcity, talent shortage, regulation uncertainty, and ethical dilemmas.

The AI industry is impactful, with startups having the potential to transform the world and society for better or worse, depending on how they use and deploy their AI solutions.

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