Foundation model companies

Heavily funded. Enormous valuations.

The underlying models are fairly equivalent, with improvements coming every few months. Pick one to pay for with all the features and learn how to drive it. Picking the right capabilities (deep research, search, etc) and improving prompts, asking follow up questions, etc. will drastically improve results.

• Open AI
  • Models
    • GPT 3
    • GPT 4
    • GPT 5
  • Products
    • ChatGPT
      • Web
      • Mobile
      • Desktop
    • Atlas browser
    • Tool capabilities in many products
      • Canvas
      • Web search
      • Deep research
• Anthropic
  • Models
    • Sonnet
    • Opus
  • Products
    • Claude
      • Web
      • Desktop
    • Claude code
• Google
  • Models
    • Gemini
  • Products
    • Gemini
      • Mobile
      • Web
• Facebook
  • Models
    • Llama

Consumer AI products

e.g. ChatGPT, Claude desktop, Gemini mobile

These consumer chat products are great for:

• Research and ideation
• Content generation - text and images
• Light code prototyping - make a fake web page design to show someone
• Very light actual app building, if you have a place to run the code (e.g. google apps script) or your own website.
  • Typically a simple Javascript snippet or python script

Model companies make money from monthly subscriptions to these apps. Under the hood, their costs heavily depend on how much you use the product.

API access to base models

All of the base models (GPT 5, Claude Sonnet, etc) can be accessed via APIs by developers, to be used in real time as part of their applications. Costs are per token and can be extremely high, depending on model and tuning.

Examples

• Converting images to text
• Summarizing user reviews
• Automated customer support that generates human sounding custom messages
• Fraud detection through analyzing unusual user behaviors

Model companies make money on a per token basis, so cost and revenue are more aligned.

AI product building platforms / vibe coding tools

These will build a website and host it for you, with limitations. They come with framework and design defaults that improve final results, but are too constraining for use in most large enterprises.

• https://lovable.dev/
• https://bolt.new/
• https://v0.app/
• https://a0.dev/

AI coding tools

Unlike vibe coding tools, these can help you build any code. You need an engineering background. These started as auto complete coding assistants and are moving toward full agentic modes, where the human engineer / product manager writes a design spec, the AI builds it and the human verifies the result.

• Github copilot
• OpenAI Codex
• Anthropic’s Claude Code
• Cursor