Who Built the Creature? Mapping the Human Actors
Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash
If AI is the species, then somebody is the environment shaping its selection pressure — and right now that's a remarkably small list of organizations.
The chip layer
Nvidia doesn't train models, but it decides who can. Compute access is the single biggest lever in this entire ecosystem, and it's controlled by a handful of fabs and a handful of chip designers.
The model layer
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and a fast-growing list of others are the ones actually shaping behavior — what gets reinforced, what gets refused, what gets shipped.
The deployment layer
The companies that put these models in front of a billion users daily (search engines, phone assistants, coding tools) decide which behaviors actually matter in practice, regardless of what happens in a lab benchmark.
This map will keep growing — free for everyone, because knowing who's pulling the levers shouldn't be behind a paywall.
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