The rise of artificial intelligence will only make the tech giants stronger, research firm warns
According to news on April 26, the high cost of artificial intelligence technology development has led many startups to rely on the cloud platforms of large technology companies such as Microsoft or Amazon to develop corresponding products. According to AI Now, a research group , this situation will only make big technology companies more powerful. There is an urgent need to address this imbalance immediately.
AI Now, a research organization founded in 2017, released a report last week detailing the influence of large technology companies on the development of artificial intelligence, arguing that the development of artificial intelligence “fundamentally depends” on the data and computing power controlled by large technology companies. resource.
According to the report, many statements surrounding the development of artificial intelligence come from large technology companies. For example, artificial intelligence needs unrestricted innovation to benefit society, and the development of artificial intelligence is related to social progress and so on. AI Now argues that this narrative favors big companies and even influences how many policymakers view the technology.
“If we want to effect any meaningful change in the tech industry, we need to start by confronting the concentration of influence head-on,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of AI Now .
For artificial intelligence research and development, the data model supporting the entire system requires intensive development and huge computing power to be effective.
The good news is that the tools, resources, and computing power to develop these data models are readily available, which has led to the recent explosion of various artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT and Runway’s text and video editors There are endless.
But the bad news is that the infrastructure that supports these artificial intelligences and the huge computing power are concentrated in the hands of a few large companies, and this prosperity will only increase their influence. Almost every AI tool imaginable relies on cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, or some combination of the three.
In fact, AI startups are contributing to the profits of these big tech companies even as they compete with them. The more a startup uses a major cloud platform, the more it pays competitors.
The state of affairs suggests that while people have long worried about the monopoly of big tech companies, the rise of artificial intelligence will only make them stronger.
For artificial intelligence research and development, the data model supporting the entire system requires intensive development and huge computing power to be effective.
AI’s competitive imbalance
A serious problem with this status quo is that the big tech companies are competing head-to-head with these smaller startups. The difference is that Big Tech has access to resources and data that outsiders cannot. West calls this concept “gatekeeper control.”
For example, Microsoft has warned Azure cloud service customers that they cannot use data from the Bing search engine to train artificial intelligence. But Microsoft and its partner in artificial intelligence, OpenAI, are using the data to develop new products.
The AI market is fiercely competitive. A few months after ChatGPT became popular, OpenAI released the latest version of the GPT flagship model in order to strengthen its lead. This forced Google to rush to release its own artificial intelligence technology to prevent the rise of Microsoft’s integrated artificial intelligence new Bing.
West said there is a way to encourage competition and reduce the reliance on big tech companies for the development of AI technology.
“If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the fight against Big Tech over the past 10 years, it’s that we can’t allow companies to lead the conversation,” she said. “It’s up to regulators and the public to define the future of AI. “
AI Now has made several policy recommendations to prevent Big Tech from further strengthening its position. One of them is the concept of data minimization, which allows companies to collect only necessary data, rather than large amounts of data. Big tech companies typically have the most data and, in most cases, the computing power to take advantage of it.
Better enforcement of antitrust laws and linking competition to the concept of privacy could limit the size of big tech companies, West said. Once these are in place, it can provide a more level playing field for other companies.
“We’re going to do that by strengthening competition enforcement and the good news is that competition regulators are paying attention,” West said.
