They Aren’t Hiding it Anymore.

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the growing consolidation of the AI market by Big Tech companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, through acquisition strategies like "acquihires" that avoid antitrust scrutiny. It also highlights concerns about the increasing control of the AI industry by a few players in Silicon Valley and Washington, as well as the potential risks of open-source AI being regulated and restricted.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Big Tech's Acquisition Strategy

1. What is the "acquihire" strategy that Big Tech companies are using to consolidate the AI market?

• Big Tech companies are avoiding formal acquisitions that would face antitrust scrutiny by instead giving millions of dollars to AI companies in exchange for a license to their technology, poaching the top talent, and leaving the remaining company "alive" as if nothing happened.
• This "acquihire" strategy was first introduced by Microsoft with Inflection, and has since been followed by Amazon and Google with Adept and Character.ai, respectively.

2. How is this consolidation affecting the AI startup ecosystem?

• The fears of global consolidation have forced regulators to watch every step Big Tech companies make, leading them to get "creative" with the "acquihire" strategy.
• This has resulted in the number of AI companies entirely independent of Big Tech being considered almost non-existent at this point.

[02] Regulation and Open-Source AI

1. What are the concerns regarding the regulation of open-source AI?

• Except for Meta, most other players are against open-source AI and are lobbying regulators to cripple the sector with arbitrary bureaucracy and unfounded claims that AI needs to be controlled by a handful of "enlightened" people.
• Regulators are regulating a technology they don't understand, being particularly vulnerable to the temptation to trust the "AI experts" who have a clear agenda and incentives to impose impossible-to-meet compliance terms unless you are cash-rich.

2. What are the potential consequences of the rules being set so that only Big Tech can play?

• If both the consolidation of the AI market by Big Tech and the regulation of open-source AI materialize, we may find ourselves in a world where owning open-source AI is considered contraband and where only a handful of people can play by the arbitrary, capital-based rules they casually wrote themselves.
• This would leave a world where the most powerful technology in the last 30 years is controlled by people who have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to "win more money" at the expense of the world.