This is how I opened January 2023’s AI and the Big Five:

The story of 2022 was the emergence of AI, first with image generation models, including DALL-E, MidJourney, and the open source Stable Diffusion, and then ChatGPT, the first text-generation model to break through in a major way. It seems clear to me that this is a new epoch in technology.

Sometimes the accuracy of a statement is measured by its banality, and that certainly seems to be the case here: AI is the new epoch, consuming the mindshare of not just Stratechery but also the companies I cover. To that end, two-and-a-half years on, I thought it would be useful to revisit that 2023 analysis and re-evaluate the state of AI’s biggest players, primarily through the lens of the Big Five: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The proximate cause for this reevaluation is the apparent five alarm fire that is happening at Meta: the company’s latest Llama 4 release was disappointing — and in at least one case, deceptive — pushing founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to go on a major spending spree for talent.  — Read More