I’m quoted in this article for the International Bar Association:
Technology: US authorities survey AI ecosystem through antitrust lens
William Roberts, IBA US Correspondent
Friday 2 August 2024
Antitrust authorities in the US are targeting the new frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) for potential enforcement action.…
Jonathan Kanter, Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the DoJ, warns that the government sees ‘structures and trends in AI that should give us pause’. He says that AI relies on massive amounts of data and computing power, which can give already dominant companies a substantial advantage. ‘Powerful network and feedback effects’ may enable dominant companies to control these new markets, Kanter adds.
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Part of the struggle for policymakers is that even defining AI is something of an unfathomable moving target, according to computer scientists. ‘What’s different with AI is, this is making computers do things that no human understands how to do’, says David Evans, a professor of computer science at the University of Virginia who conducts research into machine learning. ‘Instead of humans working either individually or as a group to write a program, AI works by training an algorithm’, he explains.
New foundational AI systems such as ChatGPT’s large language model are based on hundreds of billions of parameters and trained with everything on the internet and terabytes of material from other sources. Newer models are being trained in ways that are ten or 100 times more efficient. ‘Once you scale it up to the size of models that you’re training, and the amount of data that you’re using to train them, it is very hard to predict, or understand, or have any constraints on what they might do’, Evans says.
If anything, that opacity is encouraging the DoJ’s Antitrust Division to take a close look at the AI ecosystem. ‘Over and over again, we see that antitrust enforcement in moments of industrial evolution has the opportunity to spur innovation in its wake, opening the door to new competitors, allowing for the development of different business models and new economies’, Kanter says.