Perplexity. Gemini. Grok. Copilot. ChatGPT. DeepSeek. Claude. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in late 2022, making it the first publicly available large language model (LLM). Artificial Intelligence (AI) had already become ubiquitous behind the scenes – detecting credit card fraud, interpreting X-rays, driving cars – but OpenAI brought AI to the masses. By 2025 ChatGPT was planning family vacations, writing contracts and editing emails, coding, and solving relationship dilemmas for hundreds of millions of users.  

A Working Paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in September 2025 suggests that the adoption of LLMs as a new technology is unprecedented. Analyzing a representative sample of ChatGPT queries from May 2024 through June 2025, the authors concluded that half of the activity related to practical guidance and seeking information, functions heretofore handled by search engines. (Writing and editing accounted for 25% of queries.) 

Some of us in the office are old enough to remember the advent of search engines Yahoo!, Altavista, and Ask Jeeves in the early 1990s. Google and Direct Hit Technologies came along in the latter half of the decade with algorithms that ranked pages improving the quality of search. Competition intensified, switching costs were non-existent, and everyone but Google and a few niche players disappeared taking hundreds of millions of dollars in research, development, and market capitalization with them.  

ChatGPT, like Yahoo!, enjoyed a first mover advantage and, like Google, holds proprietary eponym (genericized trademark) status. While LLMs do much more than search engines, the comparison may prove serviceable. Better and differentiated models have been – and will be – introduced. Consumers and enterprises will develop preferences. Regulations will evolve. Governments will promote national champions. And the LLMs and their sponsors will need to navigate an environment of high costs (talent, compute, storage, research & development) while establishing moats and profitability.  

Investors will get a closer look at OpenAI and Anthropic (creator of Claude) as they move towards initial public offerings (IPO). In the meantime, the NASDAQ composite, a broad barometer of technology stocks, slumped into the long holiday weekend amid concerns over the exuberant spending required to scale these AI platforms.  

We have no doubt that some of the LLMs listed above will be archived to the annals of history. Unlike the battle for search, the battle of the LLMs is being fought with billions of dollars, often by established companies that were tested in the first battle. We anticipate continued volatility as the battle progresses, hope that the fall out is contained, and resist planning for any one outcome.

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