Where the battle to dominate AI may be won

When you fire up an artificial intelligence chatbot like Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, you’re really interacting with the product of three or four key ingredients.

When you fire up an artificial intelligence chatbot like Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, you’re really interacting with the product of three or four key ingredients. One is the engineering talent it took to design the chatbot’s AI model. Another is the vast amount of training data the model chewed through to learn to respond to your prompts. The third are the advanced semiconductor chips used to perform the training, a procedure that can take months even with the fastest chips. Now, cloud platforms are fast becoming the fourth essential ingredient in AI. They aggregate information from all of those in-demand semiconductor chips, provide online storage and many other services, renting out capacity to AI companies that need raw processing power and a place to keep their training data. AI developers’ reliance on cloud services shapes the ebb and flow of the broader AI industry, putting cloud companies at the heart of a technology that’s poised to transform the way people work, play and learn. Just a handful of major players dominate the half-trillion-dollar cloud market, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Now, policymakers and industry critics warn, Big Tech’s power in cloud markets may give it enormous and possibly anticompetitive influence over the future of AI. “I am deeply concerned that a handful of Big Tech firms dominate cloud computing and storage,” Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren told CNN. “Without commonsense regulation, those companies will entrench their dominance over AI, crush competitors, and put consumer privacy and safety, innovation, and national security at risk. We must protect competition in this critical industry.”