Start-up activity in the LLM ecosystem

The technical and mainstream media’s headline coverage of AI invariably centers around the often astounding abilities demonstrated by large language models. That’s hardly surprising, since to all intents and purposes that’s where the newsworthy magic of generative AI lies. But it takes a village to raise a child: behind the scenes, there’s an entire ecosystem that supports the development and deployment of these models and the applications that are built on top of them. Some parts of that ecosystem are dominated by the Big Tech incumbents, but there are also many niches where start-ups are aiming to gain a foothold. We take a look at some components of that ecosystem, with a particular focus on ideas that have led to investment in start-ups over the last year or so.