Friday’s Google and OpenAI announcements were perhaps as big as the release of Dall-E2 and ChatGPT, except on the same day. While the world fixates on NVIDIA's financials and glorifies backward-looking achievements, the path ahead turns treacherous even for the giants as they go after each other with more impunity, cash, and powerful innovations whose abilities and trajectories are more unknown than ever.

Take Friday's announcements: when you combine LLMs being capable of processing millions of tokens and their ability to do a text-to-video conversion, the day of a machine making a half-hour movie from a book is not far away. This could disrupt not just all in media but pose never-before-type challenges for giants like Adobe.

There were so many announcements just before where it became obvious that for hundreds of billions of investments to result in some profits, the giants have to go after each other:

1. Rumors suggest OpenAI entering the search domain, a realm traditionally dominated by Google and Meta, indicates a bold move into online advertising revenue.

2. With Chat with RTX, NVIDIA directly challenges Microsoft and OpenAI's Copilot efforts at the consumer edge.

3. Some months before, Microsoft announced a re-entry into the highly competitive handphone market, setting them on a collision course with Apple.

4. Apple's awake from the slumber on new-age AI, aka foundation models. From iOS18, AI will likely be the only primary focus in hardware and software announcements for the next few years.

5. The LLM race may appear like one between Google and OpenAI, but the open source world continues to close the gap, led by Meta, X, and players globally.

6. The same is true in GPUs. NVIDIA’s domain is targeted by Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and even Microsoft based on previous announcements apart from its traditional competitors. And now you have announcements mentioning a hundred billion Dollars or more from SoftBank, Saudi Arabia, and Sam Altman.

We had a quiet world of giants, secure in their domains of specialization - cars by one, GPUs by another, movies, phones, social media, enterprise software, and cloud, each dominated by one. We are suddenly in a rumble where the giants are already bruising each other and braying for blood.

Passive investors should make few presumptions on estimates or growth ahead, not just because of the technological disruptions but also changing business strategies. That’s why GenInnov - the active, long-only, about-to-be-launched global innovation fund – wants to invest based on evidence, observation, and monitoring of big themes.