September by D’Ornano + Co.: Spotting the winners of the foundation model race, Unpacking Alan’s not so crazy $4.5B valuation and exploring Adobe’s GenAI overreaction.

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Dear readers,   

The recent days have shown that interest in genAI is still at its peak despite the clouds that have emerged in recent weeks. The race for foundation models is still ongoing with OpenAI targeting a 150B$ valuation in its latest fundraising expected to close in the next days. Everyone wants to know which companies will emerge as winners of the new technology, in the same way that Amazon, Paypal, Netflix, and others that emerged from the internet era.

At the foundation model layer, the first layer of the genAI tech stack (beyond hardware & core infrastructure), winners are now starting to appear almost two years after genAI went into the public domain with GPT 3.5. Beyond technical considerations where it is fantastic to see the change and disparities in rankings on performance, efficiency, accuracy, and other criteria used to rank foundation models between closed vs. open-sourced, large vs. small models, and US vs non-US, the speed of adoption at consumer & enterprise lev…