Tech execs think AI is giving Big Tech ‘inordinate’ power because the development of AI is concentrated in the hands of too few companies.

This gives them excessive control over the rapidly evolving technology.

Due to the novel way OpenAI’s ChatGPT can respond to user prompts, OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked a surge in interest in AI late last year.

A tech industry arms race has been sparked by the popularity of AI, with tech giants such as Microsoft and Google developing and releasing their own artificial intelligence models. As they are trained on massive amounts of data, they require an enormous amount of computing power.

The resources needed to develop and deploy these large scale AI models are available to only a handful of companies at the moment. As a result, they have inordinate power over our lives and institutions,” said Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, an encrypted messaging app.

Again, we should be concerned about corporations driven by profits and shareholder returns making such socially consequential decisions.”

Whittaker previously worked at Google for 13 years before becoming disillusioned when she discovered Project Maven was a controversial contract with the Department of Defense. When Whittaker became concerned about Google’s artificial intelligence being used for drone warfare, he organized a massive walkout at the company.

Whittaker noted that artificial intelligence is fundamentally a technology based on centralized corporate control and power.

It is built on the concentrated resources that have been accrued to a handful of large technology companies, mostly based in the US and China, from the surveillance advertising business model, which has provided them with highly sophisticated computation infrastructure and a wide range of data sources.