The list of companies leading the arms race for generative artificial intelligence tells you all you need to know about the risks we face from a concentration of power in this technology and how blockchain’s decentralizing data management model can help mitigate them.
The five most prominent members of the corporate establishment now participating in AI are familiar names: Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta. They’re the same internet platforms that have dominated Web2 for the last two decades. Between them, these five players are investing billions in the technology, both via giant stakes in startups such as Open AI and Anthropic and with their own internal projects.
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Not coincidentally, those companies occupy five of the seven top positions in overall corporate market capitalization rankings. Their combined market capitalization is just shy of $10 trillion. Add in sixth-placed Nvidia, whose graphic cards are being aggressively purchased by those same five to build the computational capacity to develop generative AI’s large language models (LLMs), and you get to more than a quarter of the entire S&P 500 market cap.
It’s fitting that the only company of comparable size worldwide is third-ranked Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco. After all, the element that explains the internet titans’ dominance – data – is often described as the “new oil.”
The pole positions these companies command stems from the massive amounts of digital data they hold about us, the human beings on whose language choices and behavioral patterns the LLMs are trained. The Big Five’s search engines, social media, browsers, operating systems and cloud computing services extracted zettabytes and zettabytes of such data about our online activity and the social relations it reveals. We were the quarries from which they extracted this new digital commodity.
Incentivized to do so by the internet economy’s prevailing surveillance capitalism business model, these companies then used that commodity to create new machines (algorithms) with…
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