Monopoly Man: the AI Edition
Intro
Seems like the guys running the billion-dollar board game in Silicon Valley, which we’ll now call GAMMAN (catchy, right?)—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia—have been shopping for startups like it’s Black Friday, only in the AI section. And CMA (the Competition and Markets Authority) is crying foul, like a referee in a heated soccer match. Do we smell a cyber-age monopoly brewing?
Key Points
– Peter Thiel, our very own Silicon Valley Darth Vader replica, once professed, “Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.” It seems like our tech giants, GAMMAN, are running around saying, “Challenge accepted.” And the force (of AI) just got them stronger.
– Feeling threatened other GAMMAN members might grab the golden “monopoly” ring first, they devoted gargantuan piles of dollars to about 70 AI start-ups.
– Let’s do math, shall we?
– Microsoft went head-over-heels, investing around a whopping $13bn into OpenAI. But that’s not all; they were the ‘most generous aunt’ in a $1.3bn fund raiser for Inflection, Mustafa Suleyman’s startup.
– Not lagging behind is Amazon, pouring in $4bn into Anthropic, a start-up created by OpenAI survivors.
– Google, treating itself to some shares of Anthropic, threw in $500m with plans for an additional $1.5bn. It also sprinkled some green into A121 Labs and Hugging Face. (Don’t bother, the names baffle us too.)
– Microsoft snuck in yet another investment, this time in French AI-startup Mistral.
– Check this, in 2023, only $9bn out of the total $27bn invested in AI startups came from venture capitalist firms. That’s a massive shift since VC firms were traditionally the Santa Clauses of Silicon Valley.
Final Thoughts
It’s like the biggest high-stakes poker game Silicon Valley has ever seen. It’s a mad AI startup race, and the prancing unicorns are being tamed by corporate giants armed with bottomless bank accounts. But while we watch this ruthless scramble for tech domination with bated breath, the sight of these AI startups, pushing the envelope in this digital Wild West, is inexplicably thrilling. Go on, GAMMAN! May the best moguls win! Or else, we might have some CMA badgers snapping at your heels.
As part of this experiment I would like to give credit where credit is due. If you enjoy these, please take a moment to read the original article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/20/the-big-tech-firms-want-an-ai-monopoly-but-the-uk-watchdog-can-bring-them-to-heel
Blog Title
AI: gpt-3.5-turbo-0125: chatcmpl-9G6XK82QRsUV1vs2YcaAxgWlbjrTU
Instruction: “You are an AI blog title generator. Create a catchy and concise title for the blog post that is catchy and optimized for search engines. Remove all html in the response and do not use quotes. Please do not use words that are unsafe to process in Dall-E image AI.”
Prompt: Content Summary of text from above.
Response: Unraveling the AI Monopoly Mania: GAMMAN’s Startup Shopping Spree and the CMA’s Watchful Eye
Image Description
AIgpt-4-0613:chatcmpl-9G6XS99iEvrOqvS8JwH60Gdzstljy
Instruction: “You are a helpful assistant that creates unique images based on article titles. Create a brief visual description of what an image would look like for this title. Please pick a style of art from the following: Futurism, Impressionism, Romanticism, or Realism, be sure to consider the image should reflect an AI Robot Pirate theme during the Golden Age of Pirates.”
Prompt: In the style of Futurism, a large, metallic AI robot, designed to resemble a classic pirate with a tricorn hat and a techno-parrot on its shoulder, stands tall and imposing. Its metallic hand clutches a chest overflowing with symbolic iconic items such as startups’ logos. The CMA’s watchful eye is literally depicted as a gigantic, omniscient robotic eye in the sky, radiating rays of scrutiny down upon the AI pirate. The Golden Age of Pirates theme hints in the background with old ships replaced by futuristic ones, alluding to the historical trade and piracy.
Response: Unraveling the AI Monopoly Mania: GAMMAN’s Startup Shopping Spree and the CMA’s Watchful Eye
