There’s a subtle war going on among Silicon Valley’s finest, and while everyone may not have taken notice, everybody is benefiting from its integrations today. The advent of AI sparked enough insecurity among all technology companies in the magnificent seven that catching up to everything AI does is part of the new race.
Companies not making relevant integrations are considered laggards, and companies adding all things AI to their existing product suite are doing it in the only way they know how to—by ripping off other companies’ innovations and stacking it on top of their existing product suite.
Is this pattern troubling? Maybe for companies that are racing to take every piece of tech they can, even if it means direct imitation, but for clients and users of AI, it means access to AI from companies they are comfortable with. With brand names they’ve seen for years and in some cases, decades.
One can point to numerous examples if they’ve been paying close attention to the news cycle.
For example, OpenAI recently launched its health feature. This does not seem an innocuous attempt to expand. OpenAI is targeting the same segment that Google Search occupies with dominance—the innumerable amount of search queries that billions of users put in to better understand their health, potential diets, and if they have the disease or ailment they suspect they have.
One could still believe that OpenAI was not interested in grabbing niches for profit if they didn’t start testing for ads. That is the final nail in the coffin. OpenAI is looking to grab eyeballs and revenue, however it can, even if it means stepping into the territory of well-established tech companies.
While OpenAI’s main HQ is in San Francisco, its proximity to the hub of America’s technology and coding industry suggests that it is still an integral part of this ongoing scrap.
Another trend that is prevalent in this muddled up race to AI superiority is circular investing, prominent among firms such as NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI, an arrangement in which large amounts of cash and infrastructure are passed around the same companies.
Along with this, multibillion-dollar deals are inked, pumping up stock value, and, in the case of Oracle, securing significant money via debt and equity financing due to a strategy that promises they will build all the infrastructure they need the money for.
In the case of Google, the company is doing everything it can to stack LLMs on top of existing technologies that have given it considerable market share over the past two decades: Gemini on top of Google search and Gemini in Google.
On top of that, Consider the talent crunch and firms that are fighting over the best they can find, such as the grabbing of AI talent from Apple for Meta’s SuperIntelligence labs or Meta’s veteran AI expert leaving to join OpenAI
And there are laggards. Apple and Meta are still trying to find a way to define their presence in AI in a way that is meaningful.
One thing is clear: All of the magnificent seven are peeking into each other’s pockets and seeing what they can get from it.