What the Five Layer AI Cake is

An editorial atlas of the artificial-intelligence industry, from 1950 to the present day. It holds 103 companies, 155 events and 33 people, arranged in five layers and readable nine ways — as a cake, a timeline, a graph, a set of statistics, or a written story.

Its argument is that AI is a stack, not a race. Each layer rests on the one beneath it and captures value on entirely different terms:

1. Silicon — raw compute. Who makes the metal that every layer above depends on.
2. Cloud & Compute — where the chips live: data centres, GPU clusters, and the contracts that route demand.
3. Foundation Models — architecture, weights, capabilities. The narrow funnel the whole stack passes through.
4. Tooling & Orchestration — the connective tissue: how developers wire models into real software.
5. Applications — the surface users actually touch, where attention, subscriptions and enterprise contracts land.

Most coverage of AI describes the third layer and calls it the industry. This atlas tracks all five, together with the infrastructure beneath them — power, land, water and the fabs — and the physical systems above. It treats India as a participant in the stack rather than a market for it.

You can read the whole atlas as text, see the five layers explained twice — once plainly, once in depth — or read what it argues.

Who publishes it

ConeApex is a one-person studio in Hyderabad, founded by Pavankumar Chakravarthula in 2025. It publishes this atlas and makes short explainer films built from a company’s own documents — filings, drawings and written procedures, never a model’s recollection. The atlas is the argument; the films are the work. More about who publishes this, or how to support it.

The Five Layer AI Cake is published by ConeApex, the trading name of Nirukta Digital XR Technologies Private Limited (CIN U62090TS2025PTC198275), Hyderabad, Telangana, India.