Who’s Really Leading the GenAI Revolution

There are many generative AI players in the market, and it’s often very confusing to understand how each one is performing and whether this AI wave is just hype that will die down or get stabilised soon. In my view, every player is offering different value, and each one is tapping into a different part of the market. OpenAI is getting the most buzz and is often seen as the one that started this revolution — but is that actually true?

The real breakthrough came from Google with its 2017–2018 paper “Attention Is All You Need.” Before this, there wasn’t any major milestone in the AI world because all models lacked the ability to handle true context. AI was good for categorisation and prediction, but it wasn’t used the way it is today simply because no model could understand context the way Transformers do.

Microsoft / OpenAI: OpenAI gave the next big push after Google by scaling Transformer models and later launching GPT-2 and then GPT-3. This eventually led to ChatGPT, which actually triggered the global generative AI revolution. I have personally used ChatGPT from the GPT-2 era all the way to GPT-5. OpenAI is tightly partnered with Microsoft, and a large part of its revenue comes from the Microsoft ecosystem through Copilot and enterprise API usage. OpenAI is still not profitable, although it has massive funding and is expected to work toward profitability in the coming years.

Google: Google is a highly profitable company, mainly because of advertising revenue. They were actually the first to give the core breakthrough with the Transformer architecture through “Attention Is All You Need.” Google has been evolving Gemini steadily, and in many latest benchmarks, Gemini models have started outperforming GPT-5. Google also has the huge advantage of Google Cloud and is now designing its own AI chips for faster inference. With its ecosystem and massive customer base, Google holds a very strong overall position in the LLM market.

Meta: Meta is playing the open-source game. They believe that openly releasing models helps the entire ecosystem grow faster, and it also challenges the dominance of Google and Microsoft. If you’ve heard of LLaMA, you already know how powerful some of today’s open-source large models are. Meta’s strategy is to make high-quality models freely available so adoption grows rapidly.

Anthropic: Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers, and they have focused heavily on safety, reliability, and high-quality outputs. Their Claude models are extremely strong, and they are especially well-known for excellent code generation and reasoning, which has made them very popular among developers.

There are other players as well, including open-source LLMs coming from China, but the space is still largely dominated by giants like Microsoft, Google, and Meta. One thing is clear: this technology is not going away. It is going to sustain, and each of these major players will continue to dominate their part of the market. If you like investing then for sure your money will grow with NASDAQ which is led by these giants . Please dont consider this as an investment advice .