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.
You’re
reading
Money
Reimagined,
a
weekly
look
at
the
technological,
economic
and
social
events
and
trends
that
are
redefining
our
relationship
with
money
and
transforming
the
global
financial
system.
Subscribe
to
get
the
full
newsletter
here.
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.
How
we
would
get
to
a
model
of
where
data
and
content
is
controlled
at
the
edges
of
the
network
rather
than
the
center
is
for
a
different
article
(perhaps
one
I’ll
write
closer
to
publication
of
the
book).
Just
know
changes
in
data
management
models
are
coming,
one
way
or
another.
With
The
New
York
Times
suing
Microsoft-backed
Open
AI
for
its
ingestion
of
the
newspaper’s
articles
into
its
model,
one
can
expect
many
institutions
that
control
digital
content
to
start
withholding
any
new
material
from
the
AI
companies.
That
opens
a
path
toward
AI
models
running
on
a
more
decentralized
system
in
which
training
data
is
used
only
if
there
is
consent
from
its
owners.
For
that
we’ll
need
the
kind
of
decentralized
tracking
approaches
that
blockchain
could
enable,
both
to
give
assurances
to
consenting
owners
that
their
data
and
content
is
being
used
as
described
and
to
ensure
that
vital
information
isn’t
subject
to
AI-driven
“deep
fake”
tricks.
We
need
a
system
of
verification
in
which
people
can
trust
a
censorship-resistant,
open-source
protocol
rather
than
the
promises
of
Big
Tech
that
they’ll
“do
the
right
thing.”
It’s
no
wonder,
then,
that
one
of
the
most
talked
about
topics
among
the
crypto
folks
at
the
World
Economic
Forum
in
Davos
last
week
–
most
of
them
agitating
outside
the
WEF
Congress’s
security
walls
rather
than
within
them
–
was
the
intersection
of
AI
and
blockchain.
They
were
energized
by
new
developments
such
as
the
Hedera
Hashgraph-proofed
data
validation
system
unveiled
by
Jonathan
Dotan
of
the
Starling
Lab
and
the
decentralized
compute
project
known
as
MorpheusAI
led
by
Erik
Voorhees
and
David
Johnston.
Those
discussions
were
mostly
removed
from
other
AI
programming
during
Davos,
where
many
global
companies
touted
solutions
to
save
humanity
from
the
machines.
(Tata
Consultancy
Services,
for
instance,
erected
a
huge
sign
declaring
that
“The
Future
is
AI.
The
Future
is
Humanity.”)
That’s
a
pity,
because
it
is
now
a
matter
of
great
urgency
that
the
mainstream
listen
to
the
decentralizers
in
the
blockchain
community.
