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Big tech companies are consuming as much data as possible to emerge as winners in artificial intelligence, says software giant boss, but that doesn’t necessarily define the winner Appian.
Appian CEO and co-founder Matt Calkins said that although Internet giants like Microsoft, Amazonand Google Billions of dollars are being spent on the technology, ensuring the success of artificial intelligence is “more than just money.”
“Artificial intelligence is not a place where money makes more money,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview Tuesday at its London bureau.
Calkins was referring to high-profile deals struck by companies like Microsoft and Amazon with makers of ambitious and fast-growing basic artificial intelligence models like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI. The deal means that Microsoft will acquire a stake in OpenAI and the latter will add its GPT language model to the Redmond, Washington-based technology giant’s Azure cloud computing platform. middle.
Microsoft struck a similar deal with Mistral, acquiring a stake in the French artificial intelligence company for 15 million euros ($16 million).
In the case of OpenAI, Microsoft has a non-voting observer on the company’s board of directors.
In a series of shocking events last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was temporarily ousted, only to return after hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened to join Microsoft in a coup.
In addition, Amazon has invested up to $4 billion in the American artificial intelligence company Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI system. Amazon holds a minority stake in Anthropic but no board seat.
Google has also committed billions of dollars to Anthropic, agreeing to invest up to $2 billion last year.
UK regulatory scrutiny
UK regulators are assessing whether Microsoft and Amazon strike deals with startups building basic AI models may constitute an effective merger resulting in a substantial reduction in competition.
Microsoft denies that the deals with OpenAI and Mistral and the hiring from Inflection constitute mergers. Amazon said its partnership with Anthropic constitutes a limited corporate investment and not a merger.
This is a market for smart people. The fact that you have enough money to buy or purchase a piece of Anthropic or Mistral or any other product is impressive. But artificial intelligence may not be a “winner-takes-all” market.
For Calkins, whether or not these deals constitute mergers that threaten the competition in artificial intelligence, there will be room for innovators to thrive.
“If the consortium won the artificial intelligence race, Google would have won it by now,” he said, citing the U.S. tech giant’s $500 million acquisition of British artificial intelligence lab DeepMind.
Calkins doesn’t think that’s the case — instead, he thinks Google lost out to Microsoft early on in generating artificial intelligence, potentially upending the structure of Google’s search business.
Prior to this, Google’s Gemini text-to-image generator had made a mistake, causing errors in historical images that went viral on the Internet. Google has paused people image generation to improve the tool. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai called the disaster “unacceptable,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC in February.
CNBC could not immediately reach Google for comment.
“This is a smart people’s market,” Calkins said. “The fact that you have enough money to buy or purchase Anthropic or Mistral or any part of it is impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner-takes-all’ market.”
He added: “There will be different AI algorithms for different purposes, and they will be more or less valuable depending on whether and how you load your own data into them.”
Calkins said the only way artificial intelligence systems can become truly smart and useful is by being able to understand what we want from them in order to use them in our daily lives.
“The best AI is going to be the AI that you put the data into, not the AI that buys the biggest stack,” he said.
Europe ‘leads the way’ in regulation
Calkins said today’s AI race is more about “how much data can you eat” than how smart the AI actually is.
Big tech companies have been “doing whatever it takes to get the most data,” Calkins said. “But that game is almost over,” he added.
This is because, in the absence of any specific laws to prevent big tech companies from misusing data to prevent privacy violations, these companies are allowed to obtain the data needed to train models.
Calkins said he was disappointed with the lack of progress in regulating artificial intelligence at the federal level in the United States.
He told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday that Europe is “leading the way” in artificial intelligence “because regulations are becoming increasingly clear.”
“In the United States, the situation is unclear, partly because the government is a little too friendly to big tech companies,” he said.
European Union The Artificial Intelligence Bill, the first comprehensive law governing artificial intelligence, was formally approved in March.
Calkins said that companies need to clarify how to use artificial intelligence safely and ensure the protection of intellectual property rights and user privacy.
“In Europe, there’s a natural skepticism…Here we have regulations that target big U.S. tech companies,” Calkins said.
“I suggest now is the time to do it again, to use copyrighted information fairly. We need a clear playing field and we need to understand what data we can use.”
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