Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Sora Since 2022, OpenAI has been the primary character in the most interesting tech and business story in years. ChatGPT was early, and so was OpenAI’s fundraising. Its models were more capable than anything else people had access to, and each new one reshaped the discourse around generative AI in the company’s favor. As 2025 comes to an end, other companies’ models have basically caught up; Google, Anthropic, and xAI have been handing popular AI