In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) intend to launch an antitrust investigation against Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia.
The relevant information was published by the media with reference to an anonymous insider who was aware of the plans of the specified regulators. According to preliminary data, as part of the antitrust investigation, the FTC and the DOJ intend to explore the extent of the companies’ influence on the artificial intelligence industry.
An insider interviewed by journalists said that the FTC will focus on familiarizing itself with the practices within which Microsoft and OpenAI operate. At the same time, DOJ will pay attention to Nvidia. In this case, regulators’ interest will be focused on the behavior of companies in the space of the artificial intelligence industry.
Currently, startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have developed chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, respectively, are becoming more active in the AI market. At the same time, technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are taking part in a process that can be symbolically described as an artificial intelligence race. The mentioned companies strive to integrate machine intelligence into their internal functional systems. Technology giants are aware of the enormous potential of artificial intelligence, which is at the same time the main driving force of large-scale progress in the context of global philosophical understanding and at the same time an obvious source of economic achievements. The financial volume of the artificial intelligence market is expected to reach the $1 trillion mark within a decade.
Technology giants are collaborating with startups to have access to advanced artificial intelligence technologies and, in the long term, benefit economically from this partnership. Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019. Since then, the total amount of financial investments from the technology giant has amounted to $ 13 billion. Microsoft uses OpenAI products for its Copilot chatbot and offers open-source artificial intelligence models in its Azure cloud.
Startups need financial assistance from business giants because the process of developing and training AI configurations is expensive. In this case, a huge number of chips are needed. The main supplier of microcircuits is currently Nvidia, which market capitalization this week exceeded the historical mark of $3 trillion. For example, Meta is spending billions of dollars to buy graphics processing units of the specified company, developing its own machine intelligence model called Llama.
It is worth noting that back in January, the FTC announced its intention to conduct a large-scale study among players in the artificial intelligence industry, including Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI. At that time, FTC Chair Lina Khan announced a market inquiry of investments and partnerships being formed between AI developers and major cloud service providers.
