How the AI Business Really Works: A Directory

Following last year’s bright boom in the popularity of AI technology came a wave of new AI businesses. Some of those businesses have built wrappers on models like Stable Diffusion, Llama, and the GPT models. Other businesses—like Deepgram—have built their own AI models from scratch.

As a company that has been building, training, testing, finetuning, and selling our own original AI models, we have some thoughts on the business side of artificial intelligence. Consider this page a directory.

Each of the articles below is an opinion, analysis, or think-piece on the AI business. If any of the titles or thumbnails interests you, click the link or the image to check it out!

There's an ever-present debate on whether the AI world will be dominated by big-tech, or if startups will show the big guys who's boss. Sure, giants like Google and Amazon have more money and engineers, but startups—especially private startups—have the advantage of minimal bureaucracy, a fast-paced environment, and (usually) enough money to make gargantuan technological advances. After all, many startup employees are ex-MANGA (read: ex-FAANG) for a reason, right?

In any case, the articles below discuss the relationship and competition between startups and big-tech. If the titles intrigue you, click to learn more!

🏆 Do AI startups really stand a chance against big-tech? - At first, it seems that small startups pale in comparison to giants like MANGA/FAANG. However, Google itself admits that Open Source language models are “faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable.” So is this a classic David and Goliath story? Or is this more like Godzilla vs. King Kong? Find out here.

⚔️ How the AI Business World Actually Works: A Startup’s War - Business rhymes with war, and the juggernauts of the AI world may suffer death by a thousand cuts at the hands of both startups and open-source communities. Brad reveals in this article why uncertainty is a moat in the AI world, and how to navigate everything from premature defensibility obsession to strategic partnerships.

🧠 AI and Neural Networks: What Founders Need to Know - This article is a letter to the founders of the world, offering the “Key Ingredients of Neural Networks” and “A Founder’s Neural Network Toolkit.”

🔈 The Top 7 AI Text-to-speech and Voice-cloning Startups of 2023 - With the growth of voice technology—both speech-to-text and text-to-speech models alike—it becomes crucial to know the big players in the game. Check out this listicle to see exactly who those are!

💻 Five Startups Shaping the Language AI Landscape in Africa - Artificial intelligence is not merely a fad in Silicon Valley. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. LLMs are emerging and advancing at an amazing rate in Africa, and here are five startups leading the charge.

Whether you’re leading a startup or a tech giant, you’re likely to find yourself at a conference at some point. Here are some insights and POV articles about our experiences at a few of the many events we attended in 2023.

🤖 Top 8 Conversational AI Conferences in 2023 And Beyond - If you’re interested in chatbots, virtual assistants, and language models, these eight conferences will definitely offer you something to pique your interest. Perhaps you may even sponsor one of these events soon! 

🍎 AI Summit NYC Recap: Deepgram (and Robodoge) take on the Big Apple - We brought our Robot dog (née RoboDoge) to New York City and let him loose. The people who visited our booth at AI Summit 2023 loved him, and we’re sure you will too!

🏄 Unveiling ICML 2023: The Truth Behind the World’s Latest AI Research - In 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning was a week-long event in Waikiki, Hawaii… and we made the absolute most of it. Check out this article (or the video within) to learn about the latest AI research, how we integrated our LLMs into RoboDoge, and which 10-year-old paper won the “Test of Time” award.

👀 Important! Defensibility among AI Companies - This article is a great reminder on what defensibility is in business, and why it’s important (beyond the mere survival or competitive capabilities of a given company). 

🛡️ Unveiling Defensibility Strategies for AI Startups - Yes, we know it’s important for a startup to be defensible, but how exactly can we accomplish that? Well consider this article your go-to one-stop shop for such techniques, with examples of how currently thriving companies have earned their way to the Mount Olympus of the AI world.

🌷 The Art of Growth: Marketing Strategies for Early-Stage Founders This video shows Deepgram CMO Marcel Santilli discussing growth tactics and strategies for early-stage businesses. This video is a sample of what we offer members of the Deepgram Startup community. Learn more here!

💸 How good, really, is AI at predicting the stock market? - The title question says it all. AI can take a look at how AI affects the stock market. This article is less about your own personal business’s growth, and more about the capabilities of neural networks in the economic space. And the results are quite surprising!

🎙️ Voice Tech is Growing. How can that Happen Equitably? - Many articles on growth focus on how you can grow, but here Ben Luks gives advice on how we should grow. Ethics in tech is an important topic, especially for sectors like AI that grow more rapidly than any of us can keep up with. Let’s delve into the philosophical side of machine learning here!

This article is meant to consistently be updated as we add more content throughout the years. If you find an article that seems outdated or even deprecated, let us know and we will update as soon as possible! Nevertheless, most of the content featured here was written to be evergreen, so we hope you find some value—whether it's entertainment value or pedagogical value—in the content featured above.

And if there's a topic you'd like us to write about soon, let us know! We'd be happy to fill in any gaps you see.

Note: If you like this content and would like to learn more, click here! If you want to see a completely comprehensive AI Glossary, click here.