Generative A.I.: It’s a Global Thing.

🧠 Generative AI (GenAI) is a novel technology that enables computer systems to produce original, human-like content across text, images, video, audio and software code. The market is evolving rapidly as more capable and intelligent models are continuously being announced. The market is not yet a winner-takes-all; low switching costs have resulted in a commoditised and fragmented landscape. However, companies can still differentiate through unique training that produces distinct styles and “personalities”. The tech industry expects the influx of new GenAI companies to continue in the coming years, followed by a phase of consolidation within three to five years. The winning companies will be those that can leverage strong financial backing while attracting top-tier talent to drive rapid innovation.

📈 According to Bourne Insight, in 2024, the GenAI market experienced triple-digit growth rates in all three major segments spanning GenAI hardware, foundation models and development platforms. The market value for foundation models reached an estimated US$ 4.1 billion, excluding end-user applications such as ChatGPT. The figure primarily includes income through API services or license fees as the models are used via development platforms. Meanwhile, the market value for GenAI development platforms reached an estimated US$ 17.0 billion. Furthermore, GPU-based hardware systems used for GenAI workloads generated revenues of US$ 132.3 billion in 2024.

🏢 While many LLMs started as unimodal, nearly all successful LLMs now include multimodal capabilities. Companies with notable cross-modal offerings include US-based Anthropic, Google Gemini (My Personal Favorite), Meta, OpenAI and xAI; China-based Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Inc., ByteDance and Tencent; France-based Mistral AI and Canada-based Cohere. Specialized vision model developers include US-based Midjourney and Runway, and UK-based Stability AI. In audio, key specialists include US-based AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs.

The ecosystem is supported by a host of development platform providers offering tools for building GenAI applications. In the US, key providers include cloud giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and diversified tech companies such as IBM and Oracle. The landscape also features hardware providers like NVIDIA, data platform specialists such as Databricks and Snowflake, model training platforms like Scale AI, and the open-source library from Hugging Face. European and Asian players also contribute, including Dutch Nebius and the aforementioned Chinese conglomerates.

While America is known for its innovation, China imitation and Europe regulation, the tides are changing and all global players are becoming intertwined and participating in the Generative A.I. space. They have to or else risk the uncomfortable position of technologically falling behind their global competitors.