Here are the top 10 generative-AI startups founded by ex-Googlers that are taking on ChatGPT

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Abstraction: 2023 roundup of ex-Google generative-AI startups

Key points:

Business Insider (Thomas Maxwell, 2023-03-29): much foundational AI behind ChatGPT originated at Google; VCs invested $2.3B into generative-AI startups in early 2023 (PitchBook/Axios). Training an LLM estimated to cost over $4M.
Adept (David Luan, ex-Google Brain/DeepMind): software-action agents; raised $350M Series B, $415M total at $1B valuation.
Character.ai (Noam Shazeer, Daniel De Freitas, ex-LaMDA): character chatbots; $150M raised, 65M January visits.
Cohere (Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst): NLP-for-developers API; $170M raised, seeking $6B+ valuation.
Anthropic (Dario Amodei, ex-OpenAI): safety-focused "constitutional AI"; $1B+ raised incl. $300M led by Google; launched Claude to developers that month (overshadowed by OpenAI's GPT-4 debut).
Inflection (Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman/ex-DeepMind); Perplexity (Aravind Srinivas)—conversational search, backed by Yann LeCun and Andrej Karpathy; plus Neeva, Samaya AI, Tonita, Vectara.

Connections: Google · Anthropic · Cohere · Character AI · Inflection AI · Perplexity · Generative AI · Large Language Models