I'm not entirely sure what the OP meant, though if you asked me "list the top AI companies" as a reflex I'd probably mention Google and Facebook first without any prior evidence. I think it's kind of hard to really compare. Could Tesla AI engineers do the AI work of Facebook? Probably not, and vice-versa. Tesla's AI goals seem to be even more specialized than most other companies (which is ok and not a negative thing). Are we comparing "solve any general AI problem" or "best at solving their specific problem"? No idea.

And Does it make sense to separate Waymo and DeepMind out from Google since that's the owner? Idk. Just a thought.

But even if they weren't exactly #2, they're probably inarguably top 5 right? That's still pretty amazing. And that's without really considering international companies. I have no idea what the AI capabilities of Chinese tech companies are, for example.

Yes, that was my thought as well. It's a pretty subjective statement, but Alphabet and its subsidiaries are pretty clearly on top and there are not too many obvious competitors for the silver. OpenAI is quite small and narrow in focus. I have not heard anything from Baidu in a long time and Tesla also has a very narrow focus and does not contribute much to the research or tooling environments. Facebook is extremely active across a range of AI applications, publishes papers, creates tooling and releases products that millions pay for.

Funny I would also not count Facebook and found it really weird when they announced the DC for meta.

With Google and ml I connect so much positive and life-changing like: health care, weather, language model, deepmind ... There research blog and papers are great.

And then Facebook.

Yeah what is Facebook doing with ml? Optimizing for the next bullshit to make our society worse?

So you admit bias against Facebook, and based on your negative feelings about it, have decided their large amount of ml work doesn't count?

Nope. I actually don't hear anything relevant from them.

Non if there things are popping up anywhere.

Do they actually do anything which helps people instead of making them more victims of fb?

FB and Google are probably the two biggest AI companies in the world if you go by scale.

Who else has multiple products scaling to billions of users daily that are built around features that use AI?

They also work on AI research that only they can really work on due to their scale.

FB is planning on spending 20b this year alone on AI and AI related infrastructure.

Nobody serious would list Tesla in a group of top AI companies.

They are pretty top notch though- and also in a different field rather than ads - that alone makes them innovators. Also, doesn't Karpathy work at Tesla?

They aren't top notch, though. And while they are a different field than ads, even in a list of top self-driving AI companies they'd only make it on if the list were quite long. Karpathy is fine and writes (or at least used to write) some interesting things, but he's far away from single-handedly turning them into a top-AI contender (I mean, if one person could single-handedly do that, he'd be far down that list of people).

Don’t forget Cruise too.