As is the case with Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon's Marketplaces, the development of large-scale language models (LLMs) and other AI mechanisms at these six companies takes place within closed, black-box systems. . They are ingesting large amounts of data. We've all unknowingly gone to internet sites and built extremely complex codebases that no one can see. Between them, they dominate storage (Amazon Web Services), compute chips (Nvidia), AI models (Microsoft with investments in Open AI), data (Alphabet and Meta), and all layers of the AI stack. I'm doing it. Devices used to interact with AI services (Apple). Although they may compete with each other, they form a vertically distributed oligopoly. Rather, they are an oligarchy given the undeniable power their technology has over people's lives. Indeed, secrecy regarding the means by which that power is exercised is a characteristic of most oligarchic states.
