Competition in AI is less a single race than a triathlon: There's a face-off to develop the most advanced generative AI foundation models; a battle to win customers by making AI useful; and a struggle to build costly infrastructure that makes the first two goals possible.

Why it matters: Picking a winner in AI depends on which of these games you're watching most closely. And the competition's multi-faceted nature means there's more than one way to win.

OpenAI

Two years after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT kicked off the AI wave, the startup remains AI's flagship.

• It has raised about $22 billion and is in the process of retooling itself from a safety-oriented nonprofit to a globe-spanning for-profit tech giant.

Yes, but: OpenAI's last major foundation model release, GPT-4, is now nearly two years old. A long-awaited successor had its release pushed back into 2025 amid a swirl of reports that its advances may not be game-changing.

• Meanwhile, OpenAI has pushed the field's edge with innovations like its "reasoning" model, o1, and impressive voice capabilities.

Models: OpenAI still has a lead, but it's shrinking.

Customers: OpenAI has direct access to a vast pool of over 200 million weekly active ChatGPT users and indirect access to the huge installed base of Microsoft users, thanks to its close alliance with that giant.

Infrastructure: OpenAI is highly dependent on Microsoft for the cloud services that train and run its AI models, though it has recently begun an effort to expand its partnerships.

Anthropic

Like Avis to OpenAI's Hertz, Anthropic seems to be trying a little harder. It has also faced fewer distractions from high-profile departures and boardroom showdowns than its competitor.

Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI employees aiming to double down on OpenAI's commitment to caution and responsibility in deploying AI.

• But it has now raised roughly $14 billion and begun to embrace OpenAI's philosophy of putting AI in the public's hands to pressure test its dangers.

Models: Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet is widely viewed as a worthy competitor to GPT-4 that, in some cases, even surpasses it.

Customers: Claude's usage numbers are much smaller than ChatGPT's, but the company is partnering with big and medium-sized firms looking for a counterweight to Microsoft.

Infrastructure: Amazon, which recently invested $4 billion into Anthropic, is putting its massive cloud resources behind the company, and Google's parent Alphabet has also provided some investment and support.

Google

Google's long-term investments in AI research made generative AI's breakthrough possible.

• But ChatGPT's overnight success caught the search giant flat-footed.
• Google has spent much of the last two years in catch-up mode — uniting its DeepMind research team and Brain unit, and injecting its Gemini AI across its product line.

Models: Google's Gemini is very much in the same league as OpenAI's and Anthropic's models, though some reports suggest that it hasn't found as much pickup among AI developers.

Customers: By pushing its own AI summaries to the top of search results and integrating its AI with its Android mobile operating system, Google has ensured that its own AI would get in front of a global user base.

Infrastructure: Google has the know-how and the resources to scale up as much AI power as it needs, but the field's competitive frenzy has left it off-balance.

Meta

Meta has embraced and promoted open source AI via its Llama models.

• The strategy is a way to avoid becoming dependent on a competitor for AI services — the way it found itself reliant on Apple and Google in the smartphone era.
• Meanwhile, Meta has been deploying its own custom version of the technology, dubbed Meta AI, inside Messenger and WhatsApp and beyond.

Models: Meta's models haven't directly taken on OpenAI and its competitors. Instead, they've offered better performance at smaller scales and the cost savings and freedom that the open source approach allows.

Customers: Over 3 billion social media users provide Meta with an enormous pool of consumers, while some business customers will be won over by Llama's low price and adaptability.

Infrastructure: Meta doesn't run its own B2B cloud but has plenty of experience scaling up data centers.

Other players

Microsoft has tied its AI fate to OpenAI, but it has also begun to build out its own in-house strategy.

• It's developing its own models in a project led by DeepMind co-founder and former Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman.

Amazon has concentrated on meeting the AI boom's enormous demand for cloud services, but it's also investing in its own series of models.

xAI, Elon Musk's venture, raised about $6 billion in the spring and another $5 billion this month — along the way building what it calls the world's largest AI data center at impressive speed.

• But it's not yet clear how xAI intends to compete beyond making vague promises around freedom of speech.

Apple has played catch-up as it works to weave Apple Intelligence into its mobile and desktop operating systems and upgrade its Siri assistant.

As retailers prepare to kick off the busiest shopping season of the year, they'll have to keep an eye out for a wave of AI-enabled bots flooding their websites, making fraudulent purchases and trying to steal consumer information.

Why it matters: Detecting bot attacks in the moment is difficult because their activity often looks exactly like a typical consumer's.

The big picture: AI-enabled tools have made it possible for scammers to automate their attacks and target even more retailers and consumers.

• For years, resellers have been using AI-enabled bots to snatch up high-value, hard-to-get merchandise, such as sneakers or air fryers, in minutes online.
• Now there are bots that help attackers automatically suss out any exploitable security vulnerabilities in a retailers' networks, which can be a launching pad for ransomware or other destructive attacks.
• And lastly, automated account takeovers — where a hacker uses a bot to gain entry into someone's online account using stolen credentials — are now faster because of AI tools.

Threat level: Even before the holiday shopping season started, retailers were facing an influx of AI-driven attacks, according to research from Imperva released last month.

• Between April and September, retail websites experienced more than 560,000 AI-driven attacks each day, per the report.
• A third of the attacks were so-called business logic abuses, where attackers use AI to automate attacks that manipulate merchandise prices, abuse discount codes and bypass authentication protocols.
• Another third were classic distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which aim to overwhelm a website and cause service outages.

The intrigue: Increased shopping traffic gives perfect cover for attackers.

• If retailers are already expecting a large uptick in visitors, it's easier to hide a high-traffic scam.

Between the lines: Defending against bot attacks requires a nuanced approach and a lot of information sharing across the retail industry, Lee Clark, manager of cyber threat intelligence production at the Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center, told Axios.

• Retail customers are sensitive to the friction that security protocols call for, such as requiring multifactor authentication for online accounts or limits on the number of products they can buy.
• Good information sharing can help retailers figure out what website domains or IP addresses to block, since threat actors are often reusing these across attacks, Clark added.

• Former Google and Stripe executives have raised $56 million to build an operating system to control an array of AI systems. (Bloomberg)
• A group of protesting artists are said to have briefly leaked access — via Hugging Face — to OpenAI's Sora video model. (Fortune)

I highly recommend the Netflix series "A Man on the Inside." Ted Danson is great — but what I love most is how the show portrays older Americans in a deep and nuanced way rarely seen on American TV.

Binge it for the holidays. That's my Thanksgiving present to you.