The author is a former Senior Advisor on AI to the Federal Trade Commission and Managing Director of the AI Now Institute. Amba Kak also contributed to this article
As AI becomes a central part of our digital infrastructure, it’s time to ponder who controls it.
Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are now in a position to strengthen their footholds in the digital economy and consolidate their power by dominating both the commercial AI industry and the future AI research landscape. Without strong enforcement of competition laws, generative AI could irreversibly consolidate the dominance of Big Tech, allowing a handful of companies to control the technology that mediates so much of our lives.
As it stands, there are several reasons why AI wouldn’t exist without Big Tech. The largest technology companies have a significant first-mover advantage in this market. Most notably, the resources on which AI at scale relies, from the large datasets to the computational power to process them, to the skills and expertise required to build these AI systems. is to have access to
These resource dependencies are also a challenge for companies such as Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet. For example, Alphabet was recently forced to consolidate its AI team and overcome intense internal competition, while Microsoft restricted internal access to its AI hardware, allowing Bing’s GPT-4 chatbot and We keep our new Office 365 tools up and running. Sam Altman, chief executive of his OpenAI, ChatGPT maker, described his company’s computational costs as “tearful.” While new startups are emerging, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and even open source company Hugging Face have signed deals with the big three hyperscalers.
Given this resource intensity, there will be tremendous pressure to leverage generative AI systems for profit. Again, big tech companies are best positioned here. They already operate a digital ecosystem where generative AI systems can be applied, maximizing their platform and market advantage.
OpenAI’s launch of an app marketplace indicates that it intends to operate on the same strategy by offering products and operating a competitive marketplace. Amazon’s launch of generative AI cloud service Bedrock is a good example. Amazon offers its own Titan generative AI model and operates a platform associated with Amazon Web Services that allows businesses to access other generative AI services. This structure means Amazon is well positioned to secure a dominant position in the cloud computing market.
If anti-competitive behavior by big tech companies has been a problem in the past, the introduction of generative AI will make things even worse.
As such, competition law must be enforced early and reliably to shape the direction of generative AI. This is the perfect time to intervene. There is already a movement for stronger enforcement of laws to deal with the concentration of power in Big Tech.
The US Federal Trade Commission has signaled its willingness to intervene early through its challenge to Meta’s acquisition of VR studio Within. This indicates a more aggressive targeting of future competition harm before it materializes.
FTC Chairman Lina Khan has expressed concern about the lack of competition in AI, saying that in transitions like this, incumbents often “panick” and resort to illegal tactics to defend their edge. It refers to trying to discourage new entrants. Support for this stance has been bolstered by the White House, bolstered by an executive order outlining its intention to curb industry consolidation.
Intervention is required on several fronts. For one thing, companies must take responsibility for trying to stave off competition. Microsoft recently started restricting access to data from competing chatbot search engines. Resource dependencies in AI also need to be addressed. Regulators in the UK, Japan, the Netherlands, France and most recently the US have all expressed concerns about the cloud market concentration. A new consensus among regulators on the dangers of cloud monopoly should galvanize structural interventions to anticipate future consolidation attempts by these companies.
Generative AI could irreversibly enhance Big Tech’s dominance. But the concentration in the tech industry has occurred in part because regulators have been lax and have missed many opportunities to intervene. This time, we need to learn from our past mistakes and act before the market is overwhelmed. It is now regulators, not businesses, who need to act quickly and tear things down.
