Who builds AGI first? It's essentially a combination of who currently has frontier models, who has the resources to keep building out compute and power, who has the necessary research engine and who is bold enough to go for moonshot ideas. S++ instead of just S because they already have positive feedback loops. They might just run away with their lead. Google ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic, because they have the advantage everywhere (scale, compute, data, resources, multimodal, research) except for current text model capabilities. So in short timelines Google would likely lose to OpenAI or Anthropic, but in longer timelines, which I think are more likely, they can still outscale them. xAI and Meta in A tier because of resources (capital, compute, data), research and current capabilities. ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek in B tier, because they have the resources (less than xAI, Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft) and the research and are bold enough to execute (Nvidia and Microsoft lack this). Microsoft and Nvidia in C tier, mostly for the bad short term timelines (market crashes, Microsoft could absorb OpenAI) and because of their compute and capital in long timelines. Baidu and Tencent in D tier also simply because of their capital in long timelines. I put all the smaller chinese labs in E tier (although i love my kimi, z-ai, minimax and stepfun bros), because they are too small and lack the research. It would take a miracle research breakthrough that can compensate a 10-100x compute disadvantage. In F tier all the other labs that lack the willingness, research, resources, or that don't even train models anymore (not a serious tier). You could fight about Mistral or Cohere having a shot, but they lack ambition. They are going for the safe business route.