According to CNBC sources, US authorities are preparing to open an investigation into Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI to examine the influence of these three companies on the AI industry.
CNBC sources revealed that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be in charge of investigating Microsoft and OpenAI, while the Department of Justice focuses on Nvidia. The investigation is aimed at companies’ behavior rather than M&A deals.
OpenAI and Microsoft are close partners. Photo: NBC News
When startups like OpenAI and Anthropic – behind ChatGPT and Claude chatbots – emerge in the generative AI market, “giants” like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are also racing to integrate technology into products and services. services to ensure you are not left behind in a market that is expected to reach $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
For example, Microsoft poured 1 billion USD into OpenAI in 2019 and the current investment scale is about 13 billion USD. The Windows manufacturer mainly uses OpenAI’s model for the Copilot chatbot and provides open source models on the Azure cloud.
Billion-dollar investments are necessary because training AI models is expensive, requiring thousands of specialized chips, most of which have so far been supplied by Nvidia. Meta – the company developing its own model called Llama – has spent billions of dollars to buy Nvidia GPUs.
News of the upcoming investigation comes just days after a group of former and new OpenAI employees published an open letter describing concerns about the AI industry’s rapid progress despite management shortfalls. and there are no protections for those who want to report wrongdoing. In the letter, they wrote that financially powerful AI companies only need to share some information with the government.
In January, the FTC decided to conduct extensive research into AI “giants”, including Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI.
(Theo CNBC)