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.
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 which to target our adrenal glands and, with consistent dopamine hits, surreptitiously direct us to take actions in their business interests. Over time, they iteratively fine-tuned a set of human manipulation tools to keep us endlessly engaged with their platforms in ways that kept advertisers, app developers and corporate IT departments paying for their services. (Six years ago, Facebook's first president, Sean Parker, let it slip that this was a deliberate plan aimed at "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.")
Those market cap numbers show that this model spectacularly served the interests of the platforms' shareholders. But there is now incontrovertible evidence that it was grossly misaligned with society at large.
With adolescent suicides having risen by around 50% since 2008, the U.S. Surgeon General has warned about the threat to young people's mental wellbeing from exposure to online bullying and other forms of toxic behavior. Meanwhile, with just about any contentious issue now locked in volleys of abuse between warring interest groups, we are finding it hard to ascertain facts and, by extension, to resolve urgent issues such as climate change and the Gaza conflict. More broadly, as Frank McCourt and I argue in our forthcoming book, Our Biggest Fight, the internet economy as currently structured is responsible for the wholesale decline in the health of our democracy.
Why on earth would we port this same destructive, oligopolistic model into the AI age, when data-driven algorithms will have even greater sway over our lives? Why allow the centralized corporate owners of the AI infrastructure absolute control over all vital information that pertains to our essence as human beings?
Of course, the platforms will fight tooth and nail to defend what they will describe as their right to exploit their data. But we've reached a point where we should recognize it as our data. It is too dangerous to have this human-sensitive information monopolized and secretly manipulated by companies that have already shown a capacity to harm us.
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