The latest Californian gold rush is about a mad scramble over generative AI. The big US tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir, as well as a swarm of venture capital firms, are all manically digging for new seams of digital treasure. But the big, and as yet unanswerable, questions are: who’s going to end up spitting dust and who will bag the most gold?
The obvious guess is that the big companies that are developing these text, image, video and audio generation models will dominate the field. As Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has written, a handful of powerful businesses appear to control all the necessary raw materials: vast stores of data, computing power and cloud services. To which, she might have added: they also have many of the world’s leading AI researchers and mountains of cash.
“The expanding adoption of AI risks further locking in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms,” Khan recently wrote in The New York Times. Such a worldview provides more traction to Khan’s trustbusting drive.