Bergur Thormundsson
Research expert covering technology in the Nordics, AI and smart cities
Get in touch with us nowAI startups spearhead development in rough seas
While Bard was not being created by a startup, it is valuable to observe the change in AI companies to understand the competition. AI-focused startups witnessed considerable growth in their funding throughout the Covid-19 pandemic as companies and investors saw the need and opportunities for digital solutions and the dividends such projects might bring. These funding levels saw a decrease in 2022 as the global economy dealt with a variety of economic shocks. However, investment levels in 2023 are returning to pre-pandemic growth rates as competition heats up. The current leader in startup funding in AI is OpenAI, the maker of popular chatbot ChatGPT that became quite prominent in late 2022. The company ranks among the most funded machine learning startup platforms in the world, with funding of over one billion U.S. dollars as of January 2023.The tech giant Google
Among the leading search engines, the worldwide market share of Google Search in January 2023 was almost 85 percent, with many localized versions available. In 2015, U.S. conglomerate Alphabet Inc. was created as the parent company of Google and several other companies previously owned by or tied to Google. With nearly 200,000 full-time employees, Alphabet’s market capitalization was valued at 1.22 trillion U.S. dollars in March 2023. Google is therefore well placed to capitalize on developments in chatbots and has extensive knowledge of optimizing search engines.
