There are more than ten thousand companies worldwide developing AI applications for industrial customers, government institutions or anyone. The following six companies are world leaders in artificial intelligence.
Alibaba Group
The tech giant Alibaba is considered the Chinese Amazon and is active in the e-commerce, retail and technology sectors. The company is one of the ten most valuable companies in the world and has operated China’s largest cloud computing platform Alibaba Cloud since 2009.
Alibaba’s research division DAMO Academy conducts research on AI applications for voice assistants, robotics, intelligent manufacturing and industrial design. At the end of 2018, Alibaba announced the development of its own AI chip, which was presented in September 2019 under the name Hanguang 800 and is intended to compete with Nvidia, among others.
Alphabet
Google’s parent company lives from the AI-supported software offers of the subsidiaries: AI helps Google with relevant search results, speech recognition, dynamic advertisements, spam filters, recommendation algorithms for YouTube, image recognition with Google Lens or the digital assistant Google Assistant.
Waymo uses AI for autonomous cars. Jigsaw, X and Wing use AI for robotics and drone technology, for example. In short: artificial intelligence is the focus of the group. CEO Sundar Pichai even called AI more important than fire or electricity.
Aside from product development, Google Brain and the AI specialists at Deepmind conduct basic research that improves Alphabet products, brings AI applications to previously untapped branches of industry such as healthcare and, in the long term, should lead to general artificial intelligence.
Google is also developing the widespread AI framework TensorFlow, which is used by the company and researchers worldwide for AI development and is the basis of numerous AI applications such as deepfakes.
Amazon
The e-commerce company Amazon uses recommendation algorithms to offer customers suitable products in the online shop. In the cashless Amazon Go stores, AI (all news) uses numerous sensors to recognize which product a customer takes from the shelf and books it directly.
With Alexa, Amazon also offers a widely used AI assistant in the Echo speakers. In the B2B market, Amazon has relied on its own cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2006, which is used by Siemens, Netflix and NASA, for example. Amazon also developed the AI chip Inferentia for AWS.
Inferentia and large GPU clusters enable Amazon to provide customers of its own cloud computing platform AWS with ready-made AI services such as image recognition, recommendation algorithms, localization or forecasts.
With Rekognition, Amazon is developing a controversial AI facial recognition software that has long been used by US law enforcement agencies. There is currently a sales freeze because Amazon, after many protests, initially insists on a legal framework for official facial recognition.
Baidu
The Chinese technology group Baidu operates the second largest search engine in the world and is one of the largest AI and Internet companies ever.
Like Google, Baidu uses AI for better search results and has been researching speech recognition, AI translation, AI assistants, autonomous driving and AI applications for healthcare in a Silicon Valley-based AI department since 2013. In 2018, Baidu became the first Chinese company to join the US-based AI ethics alliance Partnership on AI.
The social network generated 98.5 percent of its 2019 revenue from advertising — nearly $70 billion. In addition to the social network, Facebook’s products include Messenger, Instagram, Oculus and WhatsApp.
In 2013, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg decided that Facebook needed better AI systems to manage existing content, make better use of existing data, and develop new products in the long term.
Facebook wanted to buy the London AI laboratory Deepmind, but was defeated by Google. The social group therefore founded its own AI department Facebook AI Research (FAIR) with the renowned Turing Prize winner Yann LeCun at the helm.
Tencent
Tech giant Tencent is one of the world’s largest social media companies, the world’s largest video game company, and one of the world’s largest venture capital and investment firms.
Tencent’s services include social networks, e-commerce, mobile and online games, payment systems, cloud storage and various entertainment offerings such as music or films.
Tencent operates the instant messenger Tencent QQ and the multi-purpose app WeChat, which has over a billion active users in China and is a digital fixture in the Chinese ecosystem.