The hottest technology of 2023 had a busy last few weeks of the year. On November 28th Abu Dhabi launched a new state-backed artificial-intelligence firm, ai71, that will commercialise its leading “large language model” (llm), Falcon. On December 11th Mistral, a seven-month-old French model-builder, announced a blockbuster $400m funding round, which insiders say will value the firm at over $2bn. Four days later Krutrim, a new Indian startup, unveiled India’s first multilingual llm, barely a week after Sarvam, a five-month old one, raised $41m to build similar Indian-language models. Ever since Openai, an American firm, launched Chatgpt, its human-like conversationalist, in November 2022, just about every month has brought a flurry of similar news. Against that backdrop, the three latest announcements might look unexceptional. “We want ai71 to compete globally with the likes of Openai”, says Faisal al-Bannai of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council.