WHY FACEBOOK WILL WIN

ESTIMATED 2017 REVENUE

$39.2 billion

MARKET CAP*

$500 billion

EARLY INTEREST IN AI

Facebook introduced Photo

Tag Suggest in 2010, which employs facial recognition to identify the people in users’ uploaded images.

PHILOSOPHY

The better it can replicate—and exceed—human senses such as vision and hearing, the better it can understand and serve users.

REVEALING QUOTE

“Now you can put a creative message out there, and AI can help you figure out who will be most interested,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during his July earnings call. “A lot of the time you don’t even need to target now because AI can do it more precisely and better than we can manually.”

KEY ACQUISITION

Natural language processing startup Ozlo, earlier this year. Its tech is expected to bolster Facebook Messenger and its chatbots.

NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT

The company announced in August that it had switched to using AI to handle all of its translation services, and it’s now processing 4.5 billion requests daily.

WHY IT IS AHEAD

While the company’s tangible applications tend to be less fantastical than those of its rivals, when applied across more than 2 billion users, they’re as transformative as any.