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I actually asked three AI programs to draw me a picture of "Gemini, GPT, Claude, Grok, and Qwen in a race". The one above, drawn by Gemini, was in my opinion the best one (and, amusingly, has itself winning the race). Here was the one drawn by GPT-5.2:
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This looks OK, but gets the mascots wrong, doesn’t have many labels or logos, and gets Grok’s logo wrong. Here’s what Grok made me:
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Perhaps the less said about this image, the better.
Anyway, I don’t often write about corporate horse races or evaluate corporate strategies — if that’s your thing, I recommend Ben Thompson’s blog, Stratechery. But once in a while it gets interesting. The AI race is one of those times. So take this post as the thoughts of an interested amateur/outsider.
(Financial disclosure: I have no financial interest in any of the companies discussed here, though honestly maybe that’s a bad move on my part.)
The amount of capital expenditure being poured into the AI race is extraordinary. Depending on how you measure it, this may already be one of the biggest capex booms in history, and many analysts are forecasting it to be the biggest by the end of the decade:
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I’ve written a lot about how this boom might conceivably turn into a bust. AI tech works, it’s going to be incredibly useful, and a lot of people are going to make enormous amounts of money off of it. Any bust would be a speed bump on the road to success. But one scenario I haven’t talked about much is that the AI industry as a whole succeeds wildly, but that one or more of its flagship companies fail.
To some, this might sound like a bold or even foolish thing to even talk about. After all, OpenAI’s name is almost synonymous with generative AI. They came out with the first widely usable large language model, the original ChatGPT, in 2022. And ever since then, their models have been at or near the forefront in terms of many of the most widely used performance benchmarks:
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I personally love OpenAI’s products. I use GPT-5.2 every day, and I also love Sora 2, their video generator. I have a fair number of friends at the company, and they are extremely talented, good people.
And yet it wouldn’t be unprecedente