Companies today are vying to become the top providers of cutting-edge artificial intelligence. But here’s the thing: The distinction between hardware and software is rapidly fading away. It’s now an all-or-nothing game. Either you’re an AI company or you’re not in the race at all—it AI-n’t no joke. 

NVIDIA’s chief Jensen Huang shared a glimpse of how the company is going big on artificial intelligence, where the current technological breakthroughs have made AI reach an ‘inflection point.’ “We are setting out to help customers take advantage of breakthroughs in generative AI and LLMs. Our new AI supercomputer, with H100 and its Transformer Engine and Quantum-2 networking fabric, is in full production,” said Huang, in the latest earnings call. 

But Nvidia isn’t the only one officially bearing the AI tag.  

‘Tesla is an AI company’, said Elon Musk, last year at the Tesla AI day event. The company has significantly shifted its focus from being a self-driving car company to robotics (Optimus), supercomputer (Dojo) and others—effectively moving away from being labelled as a car company. 

The latest contender, OpenAI, is also trying hard to remain synonymous as an AI company. The company recently bought the domain name ‘ai.com’. For over two years, the company has been also working on developing supercomputers, alongside Microsoft.

Every tech company—including Google, Meta, and Amazon and others—is visibly fascinated by the ongoing race to become an artificial intelligence company. The sense of entitlement is pretty serious. 

If AI was a religion 

Apple seems to have cracked the code long ago and focused on offering AI to the market—not in the context of Adam and Eve but innovation wise, yes.   

Take Apple’s ‘Siri’, the trailblazer of the digital assistant game, which was launched in 2011. But, for six long years, Siri was stuck inside the iPhone. Amazon’s Alexa, meanwhile, emerged as the market leader in part because it bridged the gap between hardware and software.

Three years later, both Microsoft and Google launched their virtual assistant tools Cortana and Google Assistant. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, mentioned that in the long run, they are “evolving from a ‘mobile first’ to an ‘AI-first’ world in the computer industry” and that already says everything you need to know to understand where Google sees the future in AI. 

Microsoft, which was once touted as a software giant, is also transitioning to become an AI company with more focus on the enterprise customers. Recently, the company demonstrated the use of ChatGPT to train its robots as another example of an amalgamation of software and hardware. The transition goes way back to 2016, when the company formed Microsoft AI and Research Group that focuses on robotics and AI. 

Amazon, on the other hand, engages in the retail sale of consumer products internationally but that is not it. In November 2022, Amazon announced its warehouse robot ‘Sparrow’, the first robotic system to detect, select, and handle individual products in the inventory. The robotic arm uses AI and computer vision to recognise and handle millions of items. The company said that using AI-based robots can help conduct more operations safely and efficiently.

Hardware would be agnostic  

Another major switch is by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD). The semiconductor leader has not restricted itself to tangible services but has pursued its way to the software fringe. With its release in December 2022, ‘ROCm 5.0’, developers are equipped with turn-key AI framework containers on AMD Infinity Hub, improved tools, and streamlined installation. 

Last year, the owner of the world’s largest social network, Meta, announced its ‘Grand Teton’ hardware platform for AI training. Additionally, Intel, the semiconductor chip manufacturer, announced that it has introduced ‘FakeCatcher’, a real-time Deepfake Detector that analyses the subtle blood flow in video pixels to return results in milliseconds with an accuracy of 96%.

Like it or not, AI is coming, and there’s no stopping it. The tech giants like Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft have been paving the way for years, while companies like Tesla, AMD and NVIDIA hopped on the bandwagon later, hoping to earn their AI merit badge someday. Ironically, OpenAI managed to grab the AI spotlight.