Top 12 Generative AI Companies

These top generative AI companies are creating the future of artificial intelligence.

Generative AI companies — both existing enterprises that are adding generative AI to their solution stacks and new generative AI startups — are popping up everywhere and quickly.

But what makes generative AI companies so different from other AI and ML companies? What are they offering that creates enough demand and buzz to earn funding from the top venture capital firms? In this guide, we’ll cover the top generative AI companies, their products and use cases, as well as a deep dive into what generative AI is and why it's growing in popularity.

Also see: Generative AI Startups

Also see: 100+ Top AI Companies

Generative AI is a kind of artificial intelligence that uses data analytics training sets, natural language processing, neural networks, and deep learning to create new and original content.

Generative AI content can be created for personal or business use and can take the form of text, images, video, audio, synthetic data, and object models. The most prominent instances of generative AI today are generative language modeling, writing, and imagery tools, such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.

Learn more: What is Generative AI?

If you’ve lately heard talk about generative AI, chances are OpenAI and its products, like ChatGPT, came up in the conversation. OpenAI is the most successful generative AI companies to date, worth an estimated $29 billion and backed by major tech companies like Microsoft.

Beyond its currently-free content generation solution, ChatGPT, and image generation solution, DALL-E, OpenAI also offers its API and different models to support companies in their generative AI development efforts. GPT-4, chat models, instruct models, fine-tuning models, audio models, image models, and embedding models can all be customized for a usage fee to meet individual business needs.

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Hugging Face is a community-driven developer forum for AI and ML model development initiatives. Its wide variety of prediction models and datasets makes it possible for organizations to custom-build their own generative AI solutions and other AI toolsets.

AWS recently became a Hugging Face partner and now offers Hugging Face products directly to its customers. A number of other companies work on Hugging Face to optimize existing AI models and develop new ones from scratch. Although the forum is designed with developers and programmers in mind, certain Hugging Face solutions, like AutoTrain, require little to no coding.

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Although most outlets would consider Microsoft ahead of Google in the generative AI race today, Google is building a foundation that looks promising for its future generative AI plans. Google is working on office suite, search, and text-based generative AI tools, much like Microsoft, but the company is actually focused on building a cloud ecosystem that operates with generative AI support integrated throughout. For example, a small group of customers is currently able to test generative AI functionality in Vertex AI and Generative AI App Builder.

What's more, the company is developing AI with scalability and ethics both at the forefront. Its AI Principles were established in 2017 to guide AI development, and Google regularly releases reports about how they’re putting those principles to work in their latest releases and product updates.

And: ChatGPT vs. Google Bard: Generative AI Comparison

Microsoft is one of the most dynamic leaders in generative AI today, developing many of its own generative AI tools while supporting and funding new technologies from OpenAI. Bing, the Microsoft-owned search engine, has recently been transformed and become the first major search engine to incorporate generative AI functions via chatbot. Microsoft also recently released generative AI content features across Microsoft 365 products.

Among Microsoft's most exciting AI innovations is Copilot, a GPT-4-powered assistive tool that is now integrated into several Microsoft applications. These are the main instances of Copilot that are available today:

Also see: Cloud and AI Combined: Revolutionizing Tech

Cohere offers a variety of high-powered natural language processing tools for text retrieval, classification, and generation. Its approach to large language models is comprehensive, not only giving users the ability to generate new content but also to search and summarize large sets of pre-written content. With a user-friendly API, app integrations, and quickstart guides, Cohere makes it possible and encourages companies to customize Cohere products to meet their own requirements.

Cohere's main products are Neural Search, Summarize, Generate, Classify, and Embed. Here's what each of these tools can do:

For more information: AI vs. ML

Anthropic is a leading generative AI startup that believes quality and safety should take precedence over quantity and speed. Its team is made up of AI researchers and engineers but also policy experts, business leaders, and stakeholders from across government, academic, nonprofit, and industrial backgrounds.

Anthropic's flagship product is Claude, an AI assistant that focuses on high-quality content generation, summarization, and explanations. Claude is highly customizable and can be used for workflow automation, natural conversation, text processing, and Q&A. These are some of the ways different industries and enterprise teams currently use Claude.

Although the company's only public-facing solution is Claude, Anthropic is developing other large-scale AI systems behind the scenes and is focused on safety and problem-solving. Here is its extensive library of AI research.

On a related subject: Algorithms and AI

Jasper is a generative AI favorite for marketers and content creators, offering features to support blog and email writing, SEO optimization, and art and ad imagery creation. It's easy to use and access, with both Chrome and Microsoft Edge extensions and the recent launch of in-line experiences.

Jasper has always had a business bent with its focus on marketer-style content, but in February 2023, the company took it to a new level with its announcement of Jasper for Business. This suite of business enhancements includes Jasper Brand Voice, which allows customers to train Jasper on their brand's specific tone, style, and language. The company now also offers Jasper API to help marketers integrate Jasper into their pre-existing tool stacks and custom CMS builds.

For more information, also see: Best Machine Learning Platforms

Glean offers generative AI-powered internal search for workplace apps and ecosystems. Companies across different industries and backgrounds use Glean to make it easier for employees to search for company knowledge and contextualize that information to their roles.

The way Glean is designed, each company has its own dynamic knowledge graph that learns and adapts to specific people, interactions, and content requests. Through this approach, everyone from your engineering team to your sales team can use Glean to find the information they need more quickly and easily. Other key features that make this a highly usable tool include:

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Synthesis AI is one of the smallest companies on this list if you look strictly at enterprise value. However, it's one of the biggest and most promising when you consider the variety of products and solutions the company already offers its customers.

Synthesis AI focuses mostly on synthetic data, image, and video generation for computer vision; the applications of these synthetic creations are numerous. Some of the use cases and applications currently being fulfilled by Synthesis AI's Humans and Scenarios products include the following:

On a related topic: Top Natural Language Processing Companies

Stability AI is the engine that powers many of the latest and greatest generative AI solutions. The company's deep learning model, Stable Diffusion, offers open-source code — primarily via GitHub and Hugging Face — that several other companies have opted to build off of for image and video generation. The company also offers an extensive API library that third-party users can take advantage of, as well as a Discord community where users can discuss how they use Stable Diffusion technology.

The company has faced controversy for its image-sourcing practices, and there's also talk of profitability problems in the organization, but it's difficult to deny the influence of a company with over 140,000 members in its open-source research hubs and a slew of customers (some even mentioned on this list).

For more information, also see: History of AI

Lightricks first came into the spotlight with its mobile photo editing app, Facetune, in 2013. It has since developed many different image and video editing solutions, as well as content generation solutions.

Lightricks made the shift into generative AI when it launched a text-to-image generator within its apps in 2022. This new feature makes it possible for users to create custom art and other images through their own or pre-written prompts. From there, they can edit and splice their imagery into animation and 3D motion creations.

For more information, also see: Top Robotics Startups

Inflection AI looks a little different than the other top generative AI companies on this list because they have not yet released a product. However, their vision and the pedigree of their founders and investors make it a compelling company to watch over the next several months and years.

The founders of Inflection AI are:

These leaders and their small team are working to make human-to-computer communication possible through plain language. In a similar vein, they’re also working on advanced voice search capabilities.

If the company's next funding round of $675 million comes through, the company will have received nearly $1 billion in funding; investors already believe in this team's potential despite their lack of product at this time.

For more information, also see: Cloud and AI Combined: Revolutionizing Tech

Generative AI is growing in popularity because it simplifies different types of tasks and democratizes access to high-value AI-created content. Although creatives in particular feel threatened by the existence of tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, business owners, leaders, and private consumers alike are enjoying the opportunity to create compelling content through simple queries.

Generative AI also makes it possible for app and model developers to create better experiences in areas like code development, gaming, AR/VR/XR, and customer service.

Generative AI technology is typically designed with neural network algorithms that mimic the design and behavior of a human brain. With that setup, generative AI models are given massive training datasets to analyze and use as their knowledge base when generating new content.

The amount and variety of training data that go into these neural networks make it so generative AI tools can effectively learn data patterns and contextual relationships, then apply that knowledge to the content they create. The success of a generative AI solution is based heavily on the quantity, quality, variety, and neutrality of the training data it's fed.

Big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and AWS are investing in generative AI startups and technology. For example, Microsoft is one of the biggest investors in OpenAI. Many of these companies are working to develop their own generative AI tools and operations as well.

The top generative AI companies in this list were selected based on a number of factors: current valuation, popularity with users, variety and relevance of products and use cases, ethicality, and potential to scale. Any known customer reviews and/or controversies were also noted throughout the review process. Pricing information was also incorporated into these rankings, where applicable.

Also see: What is Artificial Intelligence?

Generative AI companies offer compelling AI technology not only to technical users and developers but to the everyday consumer. The companies in this list have put forth some of the most interesting generative AI tools and use cases to date and are worth watching if you’re keeping an eye on the future of AI technology.

Some of these companies have had a meteoric launch, releasing several different products and generating millions of dollars in funding. On the other hand, a few of these organizations have taken a slower and steadier approach, first focusing on their idea and the ethics and safety behind development before going all in on a product launch. In all of these cases, the top generative AI companies are creating solutions that have the potential to scale with business and private user expectations in the long run.

On a related topic: Top Natural Language Processing Companies