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Big tech companies are consuming as much data as possible to become AI winners – but that’s not necessarily what will determine the winners, according to the software giant’s boss Appian.
Matt Calkins, co-founder and CEO of Appian, said that although the Internet giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are spending billions on the technology, ensuring that success in AI is “not just about money.”
“AI is not a place where money makes more money,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview in the London office on Tuesday.
Calkins was referring to the high-profile deals that companies like Microsoft and Amazon are making with ambitious and fast-growing makers of foundational AI models like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, a deal that involves Microsoft getting a stake in OpenAI and the latter adding its GPT language models to the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.
Microsoft struck a similar deal with Mistral, taking a 15 million euro ($16 million) stake in the French artificial intelligence firm.
In the case of OpenAI, Microsoft has a non-voting observer who sits on the company’s board.
This comes after a shocking series of events last year in which OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was temporarily suspended before returning later after hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened a coup to join Altman at Microsoft.
Separately, Amazon has invested a whopping $4 billion in US artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, which is behind the Claude AI system. Amazon holds a minority stake in Anthropic, but has no seat on the board.
Google has also committed billions in funding to Anthropic, agreeing to invest up to $2 billion last year.
Control by UK regulators
UK regulators assess whether deals between Microsoft and Amazon with core AI startups were agreed may constitute effective mergers that may lead to a significant reduction in competition.
Microsoft denies its deals with OpenAI and Mistral, and the hiring by Inflection constitutes a merger. Amazon says its partnership with Anthropic represents a limited corporate investment, not a merger.
This is a market for the smart. The fact that you have enough money to buy or buy part of Anthropic or Mistral or something like that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a winner-take-all market.
For Calkins, whether or not these deals qualify as mergers that threaten AI competition, there will be room for innovators to thrive.
“If coalitions won the AI race, Google would have won by now,” he said, calling for the US tech giant’s $500 million acquisition of British artificial intelligence lab DeepMind.
Far from it, Calkins argues — instead, he thinks Google has lost out to Microsoft early on when it comes to generative AI, which threatens to upend the fabric of Google’s search business.
It follows a gaffe in which Google’s Gemini text-to-image generator produced inaccuracies in historic photos that went viral online. Google has paused generating images of people to improve the tool. CEO Sundar Pichai called the failure “unacceptable,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC in February.
Google was not immediately available for comment and contacted CNBC.
“It’s a market for the smart,” Calkins said. “The fact that you have enough money to buy or buy a piece of Anthropic or Mistral or something like that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be the winner-take-all market.
“There will be different AI algorithms for different purposes, and they will be much more or less valuable, depending on whether and how you’ve loaded your own data into them,” he added.
Calkins said the only way AI systems can become truly smart and useful is if they are able to understand what we want them to use in our daily lives.
“The best AI will be the AI you put your data into, not the one that bought the biggest stack,” he said.
Europe has a “lead” on regulation
Calkins said the AI race today has become more about “how much data you can eat” than how smart the AI actually is.
Big tech companies are “doing everything they can to get the most data,” Calkins said. “But this game is almost over,” he added.
That’s because in the absence of specific laws to prevent Big Tech from eating data to prevent privacy violations, these companies have been allowed to get the data they need to train their models.
Calkins said he was frustrated by the lack of progress on AI regulation in the US at the federal level.
Europe has a “head start” on AI in some ways “because clarity is emerging on regulation,” he told CNBC.Squawk Box Europe’ on Tuesday.
“In the United States, it’s not clear, in part because the government is a little too friendly to Big Tech,” he said.
The European Union formally approved its AI Act, the first comprehensive law governing artificial intelligence, in March.
Calkins said businesses need clarity on how they can use AI safely and ensure things like intellectual property protection and users’ personal privacy
“There’s a natural skepticism in Europe … here we have regulations that run counter to the American big tech firms,” Calkins said.
“I would suggest that it is time for this again, with fair use of copyrighted information. We need a clear playing field, we need to understand what data we are allowed to use.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/appian-ceo-on-big-tech-ai-strategy-competition-concerns-regulation.html
