The result is good for traditional technology companies, but not so good for society. Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Metaplatforms Inc. are almost certainly eyeing these AI startups, looking for ways to swallow their talent without incurring the wrath of antitrust regulators. are doing. Microsoft, through an unusual employment and licensing agreement with Inflection, gave them his one strategy to follow. The other is investment-based partnerships. Last week, Amazon completed a $4 billion investment in Anthropic. This will require manufacturers of Claude chatbots to use Amazon's data centers and chips.
The continuation of these alliances has resulted in an even more disconcerting concentration of power among the tech giants, who continue to make major design decisions about AI behind closed doors.
Fortunately, a countervailing force is gaining momentum: open source AI. This is not to be confused with OpenAI, which is secretive about how ChatGPT works. Rather, it refers to companies that take a different path and make the inner workings of their AI models available to the public and free to use.
For example, earlier this month, Elon Musk said his AI company xAI would open source a chatbot known as Grok. Open source AI is not profitable and the quality of such models is not yet on par with OpenAI or Google, but they are catching up. And perhaps it is no surprise that many of the companies leading the way in the democratization of AI are located in France, the land of equality and mathematical excellence.
