Big Tech's sprawling AI investments

Welcome to the 22nd issue of the Tech Wrap-Up Europe newsletter.

Every few weeks, we'll be sharing interesting stories and expert insights from LinkedIn members.?

In this issue, Sam Shead , LinkedIn's tech and innovation editor for the UK and Europe, looks at the artificial intelligence startups that are catching the eye of the world's biggest technology companies.?

We also look back at the key themes from this year's Mobile World Congress show.?

The biggest technology companies in the world are continuing to double down on artificial intelligence by snapping up stakes in promising startups.?

In the last two years, tech heavyweights including 谷歌 and 微软 (LinkedIn's parent company) have pumped billions of dollars into AI startups in a bid to capitalise on their innovations as the AI race heats up.?

Last week, Microsoft struck a multi-year partnership deal with French startup Mistral AI . As part of the partnership, Microsoft invested €15m ($16m; ￡13m) and gave the startup access to an undisclosed amount of computing power on its Azure cloud platform.?

AI consultant Nina Schick , who founded Tamang Ventures , wrote on LinkedIn that the partnership is indicative of "how strategic Satya Nadella has been on dominating and owning the core AI tech stack".?

And it's not just US tech giants that are getting in on the action. China's 阿里巴巴集团 led a financing round of at least $600m (€552m; ￡473m) in Chinese AI startup MiniMax , Bloomberg reports .?

But these allegiances between Big Tech and AI startups aren't going unnoticed by regulators. A growing number of competition probes are underway, including one into Microsoft and Mistral that was announced by the EU shortly after the deal was made public.?

Policymakers are concerned that incredibly powerful AI systems of the future will be operated and controlled by a relatively small number of tech companies on the west coast of the US.

But, for now at least, the AI spending frenzy continues. So where has Big Tech been splashing the cash exactly??

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's mostly on AI startups in the US and Europe. Around half a dozen ambitious AI upstarts focused on building large language models (LLMs) – the technology used to underpin generative AI products – have attracted the lion's share of the capital.

Here's a closer look at the AI startups that Big Tech is backing:

1. OpenAI

Founded: 2015

Funding: ~$14bn

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Big Tech backer: Microsoft

Led by tech luminary Sam Altman, OpenAI is famous for its ChatGPT tool, which became the fastest-growing application ever last January. Since then, it has built several other generative AI products including a text-to-image tool called DALL·E and text-to-video tool called Sora.

2. Anthropic

Founded: 2021

Funding: $7.3bn

Headquarters: San Francisco, California?

Big Tech backers: Google, 高通 , 亚马逊

Set up by a team of ex-OpenAI employees, Anthropic wants to be seen as a public benefit corporation. Its mission is to develop "helpful, harmless, and honest" AI models. The company's chatbot is called Claude.?

3. Inflection AI

Founded: 2022

Funding: $1.5bn

Headquarters: Palo Alto, California

Big Tech backers: Microsoft, Nvidia

Inflection AI was co-founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman , DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and former DeepMind research scientist Karén Simonyan . The company has developed a chatbot called Pi that's designed to be personal and empathetic.?

4. Mistral AI

Founded: 2023

Funding: $528m

Headquarters: Paris, France

Big Tech backer: Microsoft

Founded 10 months ago in Paris by Meta and Google DeepMind alumni, Mistral AI is building multilingual LLMs. The company, which is led by Arthur Mensch , was valued by investors at €2bn in December.?

5. Cohere

Founded: 2019

Funding:? $435m

Headquarters: Toronto, Canada

Big Tech backer: 英伟达

Cohere, which has developed multilingual language models trained on data from native speakers, aims to differentiate itself from other AI startups by focusing on business use cases. Its platform is cloud agnostic, meaning it can be deployed inside public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) , a customer’s existing cloud, virtual private clouds or on-site.?

It was founded by Aidan Gomez , Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst . Before setting up Cohere, Gomez co-authored the seminal paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer, the architecture behind LLMs.?

6. ADEPT

Founded: 2022

Funding: $415m

Headquarters: San Francisco

Big Tech backers: Microsoft, NVIDIA

Adept has built an AI that can interact with various software tools, application programming interfaces (APIs), and websites. It aims to convert users' goals expressed in plain language into actions.

7. Hugging Face

Founded: 2016

Funding: $399m

Headquarters: Paris, France

Big Tech backers: NVIDIA, Alphabet Inc. , Salesforce and 英特尔

Another AI startup founded by French entrepreneurs, Hugging Face is developing computer tools for building applications using machine learning. It is most notable for its transformers library that can be used to build natural language processing applications.?

The world's biggest mobile technology conference took place in Barcelona, Spain, again last week and everyone from 三星电子 to Google DeepMind was there to show off their latest innovations.?

"The show, which focuses on some of the most critical stories and trends in technology, media, and telecom, had a packed event programme filled with interesting insights into the way that artificial intelligence is impacting and disrupting telecoms, and the opportunities that the technology can bring," wrote CNBC's Ryan Browne on LinkedIn .?

"Networks (are) making major investments into their own proprietary AI, as well as partnering with hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for a helping hand with the cloud and software expertise they often lack," he added.?

In terms of products on display at the show, the most attention-grabbing ones had AI at their core, with companies like Samsung, HONOR and Humane all showcasing new features that are powered by the technology.?

One of the main themes this year focused on how Europe is behind the US and Asia when it comes to mobile infrastructure investment.

"China, Korea [and] Japan are leading together with the US," said Mats Granryd , director general of the GSMA , an association that represents the interests of mobile network operators worldwide and organises MWC.?

"The Middle East is going strong as well, but Europe is definitely part of the race," Granryd said in an interview with LinkedIn News editor Andrés Valdés López . "It's not a lost cause, by no means."?

By 2030, Granryd expects up to 90% of Europeans to have a 5G connection.?

In order to get there, European telcos will need to invest significantly. But they don't think they should do it alone.?

Europe’s biggest telecoms companies have been calling on the EU to make Big Tech firms like Google, Meta and Netflix pay a "fair" contribution for using their networks.?

Twenty telco bosses signed an open letter last year arguing that the companies that "benefit most" from telecoms infrastructure and drive traffic growth should contribute more to costs. Signatories included the CEOs of 英国电信集团 , Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica .?

???? Europe's new rules for Big Tech. The bloc's new competition rules for large digital companies are officially going live. Read what experts are saying .

?????? OpenAI hits back at Elon Musk lawsuit. OpenAI has issued a public rebuttal to Elon Musk's recent lawsuit, which accused the ChatGPT maker of abandoning its founding mission as a nonprofit. Read what experts are saying .

?? Spotify tests EU's Apple ruling. Spotify wants to offer customers pricing information and links to subscribe right in its app – but 苹果 has to sign off first. Read what experts are saying .

?? Reddit, Inc. users worry about IPO. Reddit users are concerned about the company's plan to go public and list on the New York Stock Exchange. Read what experts are saying .

?? Sage generative AI product. Sage launched a new generative AI-powered tool called Sage Copilot to work alongside its current HR and accounting tools. Read what experts are saying .

?? AI is 'changing the human experience'. Artificial intelligence is having a profound impact on our world and changing what it means to be human, writes Financial Times AI editor Madhumita Murgia in her new book CODE DEPENDENT. Read her excerpt here.

Kristo K??rmann – K??rmann is the CEO of London fintech firm Wise . He posts about startup culture and tech events.

Felix M. Simon – Simon is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford . He posts about how AI is impacting journalism.

Dom Hallas – Hallas is executive director of the Startup Coalition (formerly Coadec). He posts about tech policy matters and regulation.

Ophelia Brown – Brown is the founder of tech investment firm Blossom Capital . She posts about venture capital and fast-growing startups.

Melissa Heikkil? – Heikkil? is senior reporter for AI at MIT Technology Review . She posts about the latest AI breakthroughs and what they mean for society.

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