00:00Hi everybody, I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes.
00:07Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, Senior Editor Alex Conrad.
00:11Alex, thanks for coming on in.
00:13Awesome to be here.
00:14A big congrats to you. The Cloud 100 list has officially dropped.
00:18So first, for the uninitiated, can you tell us what is the Cloud 100 and how does Forbes compile it?
00:25The Cloud 100 is our definitive ranking of the leading private cloud computing companies in the world.
00:31So that's anything from an AI software company to a payments company to a security company.
00:38And we've made this list for nine years in partnership with two venture capital firms,
00:44Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures.
00:47A lot has changed in nine years, obviously.
00:50But something that's changed really in the past year and a half is AI burst onto the scene,
00:55especially when ChatGPT was launched in November 2022.
00:59So how is AI impacting the list?
01:01So last year, OpenAI jumped up to number one and we sort of saw AI starting to be a big part of this list.
01:08And this year, it got even crazier.
01:10We have 16 AI companies on the Cloud 100 list and three in the top 10.
01:15There's OpenAI at number one, there's Anthropic at number five, and there's also ScaleAI at number seven.
01:20So we're seeing AI really dominate because this list values high revenue growth,
01:26employee headcount, industry buzz, as well as increasing valuations.
01:31And AI has all of those things right now.
01:34Sam Altman and OpenAI really joined the national conversation, like I said earlier, with the launch of ChatGPT.
01:42As you said, OpenAI is number one once again.
01:45So tell us about the company and the year that they had.
01:48So OpenAI continues to be the most popular creator of these large language models
01:54with GPT-4 and this GPT-4.0 kind of smaller version.
01:59But it's in a big race with Anthropic and a couple of other companies and also open source,
02:04where we saw last month Facebook launched a new open source model, Lama 3.1,
02:10which is supposed to be almost as good.
02:12So OpenAI is still the most popular and the most revenue generating of these model creators,
02:18but it's in a big race where you could be using ChatGPT, you could be using Anthropic's Cloud,
02:23you could be using other chatbots.
02:25We're still sort of figuring out where that market sits.
02:28Anthropic really skyrocketed this year.
02:31Last year it was number 73.
02:33Now it's number five.
02:35Talk to us about that growth and the year that that company's had.
02:38Anthropic was a spin-out from OpenAI where the founders, including a brother-sister duo,
02:44Dario and Daniela Amadei, wanted to make a safer, more responsible version of AI.
02:50But from the get-go, it ironically was also very business-minded.
02:54OpenAI also now has billions in revenue and is focused on being a business application.
02:59But think of OpenAI as really popular with consumers, maybe tech companies, small companies.
03:05I wrote last month about a company called Airtable, which is also on this list,
03:08which has built on top of OpenAI.
03:10Anthropic is very enterprise-focused where it's looking for those really big companies.
03:14It's been backed and partnered with companies like Salesforce to offer business use cases.
03:20One thing that I find really interesting that we found out in this reporting is that
03:24the CEO of Anthropic likes how it's being used in health care.
03:28So you can imagine companies are starting to use Anthropic's tools to study patient conversations
03:35or come up with a better file because, as I'm sure you know, doctors have so much paperwork to do.
03:41They want to be helping people.
03:42And so a tool like Anthropic's can really speed that up.
03:45And why specifically to our Forbes audience should they know about Anthropic?
03:50I think our Forbes audience, their companies are going to be figuring out how they want to use these tools.
03:56They could be building on top of OpenAI or Anthropic.
03:59They want to be partnering with the right model that fits their business use case.
04:03And what we've seen is some really interesting companies starting to kind of tailor those available models to their work functions.
04:10So if you're a media company like ours, you're going to be exploring with AI,
04:13whether it's in our birdie CMS or some of the other answers we offer.
04:17If you're a retailer, you want AI to be helping you figure out better inventory
04:22or maybe when you should launch a product.
04:24Banks are also playing with it.
04:26Basically any sector, you want to be using AI to speed up processes, get smarter about your business.
04:32And so I think Anthropic and OpenAI are really the two leading players right now to know there.
04:37But there are so many, especially at the back of our Cloud 100 list.
04:40You see companies like Mistral, a French startup.
04:43You see Cohere, which came out of Toronto, Canada.
04:45There's a bunch of AI companies that are really interesting based on what you're trying to do.
04:50Talk about those AI companies a little bit more.
04:52I know you want to talk about, or we talked about OpenAI.
04:55We talked about Anthropic.
04:56Those are two to keep our eyes on.
04:58But you mentioned that there has been a lot, an increase in AI companies on this list this year.
05:03Talk to us about those.
05:05Yeah, so one notable company is Perplexity, which Forbes has had its run-ins with.
05:11As I'm sure you remember, our editor-in-chief called out Perplexity for reappropriating Forbes' work
05:18that we had spent a lot of time on and not giving us a lot of credit in its engine that gives answers.
05:25But Perplexity is building interesting tools, and it is popular.
05:28So despite whatever issues it had with us at Forbes, we still put it on the list.
05:33And then you're also seeing video generation appearing on the list.
05:36So Runway is a New York-based company that's really interesting,
05:39that allows you to basically create a cool AI-generated video from just a prompt.
05:44They're another notable newcomer on this list.
05:46And what about the notable non-AI companies?
05:49I know we're keeping our eye on AI, everything, that new flavor of the month.
05:53But what else aside from AI?
05:55Yeah, you know, it's funny.
05:56Forbes, we obviously publish an AI50 list.
05:58And there is increasing overlap because the cloud includes AI.
06:03But there's a lot of other sectors that are relevant to the cloud.
06:07You see Wiz, which just recently turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer by Google.
06:13It soared up the list this year.
06:15And then we also had a couple of interesting newcomers in fintech,
06:18where we saw Ramp and Brex appear on the Cloud 100 list.
06:21They were initially known for being sort of corporate credit cards.
06:24But as they have more software tools for managing payments, managing spend for a company,
06:29they're really software businesses as well.
06:32And that's why you see them both appear high on the Cloud 100 list this year.
06:35Alex Conrad, once again, thanks for your reporting.
06:38A big congrats to you.
06:40Hope you come back soon.
06:41Can't wait.
06:45Thanks.
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