To what extent is a company an “AI company”?

Posted Sep 5 2024

This post suggest a classification based on 10 levels.

Level 1: The company doesn't use AI.

→ Their competitors, suppliers are already using AI and it’s already changing it's position in the ecosystem.

→ Some employees are using Claude, ChatGTP, or other tools for work without telling their boss.

→ In fact, all the tools we are using use AI under the hood. Your inbox, your camera, your social feeds depend on learning algorithms.

In other words, it's impossible to run a business strictly without AI, even if someone wanted to.

Level 2: The company uses AI officially.

→ The company subscribes to a couple of SaaS.

→ For instance, it may use @clipdropapp for image editing or @heyjasperai for text generation.

→ This may company encourages employees to use Claude or ChatGPT for work.

Most companies are at level 2 today.

Level 3: The compagny implements AI workflows

→ This company restructures its workflows around AI to maximize automation.

Most companies are becoming level 3 while you are reading this thread. They are restructuring the way they are organized to maximize positive AI impact.

Level 4: The company is an AI-first company

→ It is a SaaS, and their product wouldn’t exist without AI.

→ It is likely doing generative AI, but it can be something else.

→ It has a good understanding of the market and injects some "know-how" through prompt engineering to differentiate themselves from vanilla AI providers like OpenAI.

Hundreds of AI-first startups are founded every day; there is tough competition for Level 4 companies.

Level 5: The compagny owns proprietary data

→ The company found a way to capture important business data and leverage them through AI.

→ It can offer a differentiated service than most competitors, especially vanilla AI providers like OpenAI won't be able to offer.

Having exclusive data can be a moat.

Level 6: The company AI is learning by itself!

I learned this concept from @ericschmidt during a chat when I was working at @google. He was an active and early AI evangelist. For him, this was “a new moat” that can make a small startup beat a big company.

→ The idea is that you can learn things from your users. For instance, you can use thumbs up/thumbs down feedback to retrain your models.

→ The more users you have, the better your model becomes. The better your model becomes, the more users you'll have.

→ To operate at this level, you need to train or at least fine-tune your own models.

OpenAI is famous for using RLHF, and that's a clear advantage they have today: they have more users.

Having a product able to learn by itself was the initial meaning of “AI first company” in the pre-OpenAI days.

This is what @cyrildiagne, @jblanchefr, and myself had in mind when we created @clipdropapp.

Clipdrop is level 6.

Level 7: The company owns its AI infrastructure.

→ Training models were too expensive and sensitive. To stay ahead, the company owns data centers or enters into multiple-year partnerships with another player that owns some.

→ OpenAI is almost at level 7 with it's relation with Microsoft.

→ Stability reached level 7 for a moment with a costly partnership with AWS. It led to a phenomenal impact (stable diffusion) but dried up their runway.

The GAFAM are all at level 7.

Level 8: The company owns its AI hardware.

→ GPUs are too expensive and prevent scale. The company didn’t want to be too dependent on a single provider, @nvidia.

→ Level 8 companies are creating their own hardware and own the full stack.

@google has been operating at level 8 since 2015 with TensorFlow and the TPU.

@meta is also operating at level 8 and introduced its first-generation chip, called the MTIA last year.

@tesla is trying to reach level 8 and actively developing its own custom AI chips, primarily for its "Dojo" supercomputer.

Level 9: The company AI is self-sufficient.

→ Energy became the main cost of operation. The compagny needed to control electricity costs and start investing in electrical plants.

No company has reached level 9 yet, but there were rumors about Google wanting to invest in nuclear plants.

This shouldn't be a surprise: all huge businesses consume tons of energy and want to reduce their bills.

Level 10: The AI compagny rules

→ The main limitation of applying AI everywhere was regulations.

→ Investing massively in lobbying was not enought.

→ Datacenter are getting attacked by ungratefull humans despite autonomous drone swarn to defend them.

Only solution: buying Iceland (or conquer it).

There are tons of free energy there, and datacenter are easy to cool.

Create your own state, define your own rules.

Own satelites for conectivity, they can’t be shut down.

Only @elonmusk is on a good trajectory to reach level 10 for now.

Conclusion

This last level is half a joke, half a reminder that these scales don't mean that every company needs to reach level 10 to be successful.

I believe every company should reach Level 3, and AI-first companies should reach Level 6.