Just how rich are businesses getting in the AI gold rush?

livemint.com:

artificial intelligence (AI) sending another company’s market value through the roof. Earlier this month the share price of Dell, a hardware manufacturer, jumped by over 30% in a day because of hopes that the technology will boost sales. Days later Together AI, a cloud-computing startup, raised new funding at a valuation of $1.3bn, up from $500m in November.

One of its investors is Nvidia, a maker of AI chips that is itself on an extended bull run. Before the launch of ChatGPT, a “generative" AI that responds to queries in uncannily humanlike ways, in November 2022 its market capitalisation was about $300bn, similar to that of Home Depot, a home-improvement chain. Today it sits at $2.3trn, $300bn or so short of Apple’s.

The relentless stream of AI headlines makes it hard to get a sense of which businesses are real winners in the AI boom—and which will win in the longer run. To help answer this question The Economist has looked where value has accrued so far and how this tallies with the expected sales of products and services in the AI “stack", as technologists call the various layers of hardware and software on which AI relies to work its magic. On March 18th many companies up and down the stack will descend on San Jose for a four-day jamboree hosted by Nvidia.

With talks on everything from robotics to drug discovery, the shindig will show off the latest AI innovations. It will also highlight furious competition between firms within layers of the stack and, increasingly, between them. Our analysis examined four of these layers and the companies that inhabit them: AI-powered applications sold to businesses outside the stack; the AI models themselves, such as GPT-4, the brain behind ChatGPT, and repositories of them (for