We have seen a few companies dominate the upstream access to large models. A brute force approach of “large is better” is disconcerting but has been very successful and commercially rewarding. Open AI’s success is mostly due to the large investments made in data access, large language models with billions of parameters fed into transformer based neural network models with huge capacities for annotation, which is the term used for properly categorizing the outputs of the model to ensure accurate results. The overall result is surprisingly good, whereby many users are finding helpful answers to their questions. This is driving the uptake numbers we all have witnessed. The risk is that with this leadership position and adoption rates, the successful tech companies, will distance themselves from the rest of the pack and create situations like Google had in search, Microsoft in Operating Systems but at a much larger consequences due to the magnitude of what is at stake.

It is not too late. The current models that are in place give people brute force access to insights and to automatically generated content. The new neural network models have been trained on huge amounts of data, are good at understanding the context of language, categorizing and summarizing using human-like language and even mimicking emotions but fall short of complex human reasoning. This will make up the next wave of Human AI development. Should the companies that have the commercial edge now then buy up all smaller companies developing human reasoning resembling AI, we will be putting ourselves in a huge dependency upstream, even if downstream application specific use cases will flourish off the back of these models. We need to ensure that the general population and companies do not fall into the trap of having to resort to only a couple of companies for their Human AI insights. This should not only be seen from the economic point of view but also from the moral perspective as we are witnessing intensive discussions already on what is ethical and moral with freedom of speech defenders vs. moralists wanting to ban any posts based on incorrect data or on statements that might harm others. Do we want to have just a few companies to choose from or do we want to promote a plurality of views? I think most will agree that we need to go for plurality and not be held ransom to only one version of the truth, especially when fake data can feed into more fake data. Here is precisely where self-regulation has its limits. As a response to this we need to foster a healthy ecosystem of contributors to avoid the concentration of power and allow for healthy competition.

Another element of a level playing field is access to data and processing power. We need to make sure that we avoid vertical data integration so that only certain players have access to this data or afford to pay for it. Similarly, we need to ensure that the processing power is not only in the hand of a few companies, as processing power might constitute large entry barriers and suffocate competition. We also need to rethink the direction in which Human AI is taking that “bigger is better” approach. We need to allow smarter solutions to compete with the bigger ones.