FTC Is Reviewing Competition in AI

The US Federal Trade Commission is paying close attention to developments in artificial intelligence to ensure the field isn't dominated by the major tech platforms, Chair Lina Khan said Monday. From a report: "As you have machine learning that depends on huge amounts of data and also a huge amount of storage, we need to be very vigilant to make sure that this is not just another site for big companies to become bigger," Khan said at an event hosted by the Justice Department in Washington. Khan said companies offering AI tools need to make sure they are not "overselling or overstating" what their products can do. "Sometimes we see claims that are not fully vetted or not really reflecting how these technologies work," Khan said, noting recent guidance from the agency on AI-enabled products. "Developers of these tools can potentially be liable if technologies they are creating are effectively designed to deceive."

Big companies are fine, it's monopolies that suck

[SmaryJerry]

Monopolies end competition and make the end product worse and more expensive. it's the same argument against the part of communism that creates government sanctioned monopolies. The US government still refuses to recognize the monopolies that exist with sections of the market. The category of 'phones' is so giant that they have monopolies in sub-sections like iphone and android. Remember when Disney was forced to sell fox sports because they already had ESPN and it would have been a monopoly on sports TV. Sports TV was one sub-section of TV where they were creating a monopoly. Why can't the government do this with phones and other big tech sub-categories? For some reason they are targeting AI because 'robots bad' but not the existing monopolies in these huge sub-categories.

Re:

[shanen]

I like it as an FP angle, but do you have any solution approach to share?

So here's a recap of my pro-freedom anti-greedom corporate tax system:

A progressive profits tax linked mostly to market share. The natural path to higher retained earnings would be to divide the too-large company into competing daughter companies. The "too-large" status would be detected in several ways, but mostly by the customers' options (or lack thereof) and by tips from wannabe competitors. (Why can't we get there from here? Becau

Re:

[sabbede]

Changing tax policy won't do much more than induce some structural changes to adapt to the changing incentives.

Re:

[MBC1977]

Because monopolies are not inherently negative, nor are all of them "designed". Unless you are expecting a large company to not innovate or purchase their competitors.

Great!

[oldgraybeard]

Government regulators(huge new cost center and clueless money pit) are involved. Regulators(mostly lawyers) do make large amounts of money for? Well mostly lawyers.

Who is reviewing the FTC?

[roman_mir]

Who is reviewing that the FTC is not dominated by large or small or whatever sized corporate interests exactly? This entire thing sounds exactly like the kind of bullshit that a private interest would try to pull to attempt and save its ass FROM competition.

Regulating into competition means only destroying economies of scale that actually create the entire industries (often new industries) because the old buggy whip industries are scared shitless that they are about to lose market share to a new developmen

Regulation will save us from SkyNet!

[zerosomething]

By definition the best AI will dominate the market. Government regulation will do nothing. The systems are already showing that the copyright of ideas was always a fantasy. Don't get me wrong I'm a full on free market capitalist that loves private property but come on. A copyright on a math formula is kind of a crazy concept. If the FTC wants to do something crack down on handing out copyrights that promote monopolies.

Correction: change Storage to GPU

[oumuamua]

Storage is not the limiting factor, GPUs are. Want to help small businesses? Give them access to a "community GPU farm" where they can use GPUs for free or very cheap. Google almost does this with the free Colabs but capacity is too small.

Why would they

[wakeboarder]

The big companies will lobby and get their way with the FTC, and 10 years down the road everyone will complain about not enough competition in the AI space. We never should have ended up with the facebook conglomerate, and look at how that turned out. Never should have been approved.

Speed of government

[MrLogic17]

ChatGPT came out in December. We're about 4 months out now, and it's changed how a lot of people work - myself included.

By the time the government starts its study, the landscape will have totally changed (again).
Hard telling what tools will be in out hand if/when the government study ever completes.

TL;DR: Hey uncle sam, don't bother

Ensuring only the largest remain

[SuperKendall]

The role of regulation is to ensure only the largest company can afford to comply; this will be no different.

So in fact the FTC will achieve exactly the opposite of the stated goal.

Doesn’t matter what Lina wants

[labnet]

America is so thoroughly corporately captured, Lina will be told to shake her fist at the sky for some good kabuki theatre while figures in the background rub their hands in glee at finally having the ultimate tool in controlling the narrative as people become dependent on the magic box that gives them the answer to everything.

In other words.

[3seas]

The AI wild west is good to go for another 2-5 years.