I recently had dinner with a friend who is much smarter than me, and asked this question, but got no answer. This guy is scary smart. When some ransomware got into my computer, he figured out when and how it got in, tracked down the Russian perpetrators, and talked them out of the code to restore my files.

His current insights were interesting though. He used to have a team of 18 engineers who mostly made video games. Now he has a team of 30 top engineers, median income 700k, working for tech firms. His biggest current client is Meta. He said AI is letting them do the work of 300 engineers and they are going through tokens like crazy. He speculated that in about three years AI might be able to replace his entire team.

He finds Anthropic's Claude to be the best for his use. He also used Claude to identify a somewhat obscure autoimmune medical syndrome his wife has, for which she was being misdiagnosed and given large doses of the wrong treatment. Anthropic gave him three tests to run to confirm it, and he had to browbeat the doctors into running the tests, and they confirmed the Anthropic diagnosis.

He would not dismiss Meta as a big pile of money run by a loser (my impression). He said they are spending impressive quantities of money and may get equally impressive results. He wouldn't dismiss the SpaceX AI efforts either. He really did not have a favorite among the big companies who will shake out on top.