Great Tech Firms · Internet & AI
OpenAI & the AI Labs
How a handful of labs came to drive AI: DeepMind's games-to-science path, OpenAI's nonprofit-to-capped-profit arc and ChatGPT, Anthropic's safety-focused split, and the rest of the field (xAI, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek), plus the economics of scaling.
Step 1 of 6 · Overview30 min read ·
Key idea
Prereqs: Nvidia; Neural networks. Next: Google; Tech geopolitics: chips & AI. Sources: company announcements and blogs; Kaplan et al., 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models' (2020); Karen Hao, *Empire of AI* (2025); The Thinking Game (2024).Next: 1. The labs