Standalone lesson.
Lesson 1561 of 1570
The AI Family Tree
Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Mistral, xAI — who made what.
Every week, the news talks about “AI companies” like they’re one thing. They’re not. They compete. They disagree about safety. They copy each other. And they each have a different vibe.
The big eight
These are the companies you’ll hear about most. The key to understanding a new AI news story: figure out whichcompany it’s about, and what that company believes.
Anthropic
Founded 2021Famous for: Claude (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku)
The angle: Safety-first. Writes a Constitution their AI follows.
Dario & Daniela Amodei — former OpenAI researchers.
OpenAI
Founded 2015Famous for: ChatGPT, GPT-4/5, Sora, DALL·E
The angle: Biggest and most-used. Started non-profit, now very commercial.
Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, others. Elon Musk left early.
Google DeepMind
Founded 2014 (DeepMind), merged 2023Famous for: Gemini, AlphaFold, Veo
The angle: Deep science roots. AlphaFold won a Nobel.
Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, Mustafa Suleyman.
Meta AI
Founded 2013Famous for: Llama (open-weights)
The angle: Gave away powerful models for free so anyone can build.
Yann LeCun leads; Meta-funded.
Mistral
Founded 2023Famous for: Mistral, Mixtral
The angle: French. Open models. Fast and efficient.
Former DeepMind + Meta engineers in Paris.
xAI
Founded 2023Famous for: Grok
The angle: Elon Musk’s AI company. Big on real-time X/Twitter data.
Elon Musk.
Cohere
Founded 2019Famous for: Command, Embed
The angle: Focused on businesses, not consumers.
Aidan Gomez (co-author of the original Transformer paper).
Perplexity
Founded 2022Famous for: Perplexity Search
The angle: AI that searches the web for you. Uses other companies’ models.
Aravind Srinivas.
Why “safety philosophy” matters
Each company has a different stance on what their AI should refuse to do. Anthropic writes theirs down as a Constitution. Meta releases model weights so anyone can check what’s in them. OpenAI has a policy team that updates rules. This is why two AIs can answer the same question really differently.
Quick check
- Which company is known for the Constitution approach? (Anthropic.)
- Which company gave away its models? (Meta.)
- Which company merged AlphaFold into a Nobel-Prize-winning tool? (Google DeepMind.)
Tutor
Curious about “The AI Family Tree”?
Ask anything about this lesson. I’ll answer using just what you’re reading — short, friendly, grounded.
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