We watched social media concentrate. The same thing is happening in AI, only at a deeper layer
The article discusses the concentration of power in the AI industry, similar to trends seen in social media. It highlights how access to computing resources has become essential for participation in the AI economy, with a few companies dominating the market. This concentration creates dependencies that can impact global competition and access to technology.
- ▪NVIDIA holds 85% of the data center GPU market, while three American cloud companies control 63% of the infrastructure for AI.
- ▪The United States controls approximately 75% of global high-performance AI compute capacity, leaving other countries dependent on it.
- ▪AI models are predominantly trained on English-language data, leading to unequal access and higher costs for non-English users.
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In 2018, my brother and I sat in a product review at Snap’s Santa Monica offices staring at a chart we’d grown too familiar with. Our daily active users had stalled. Instagram (which had launched a near-identical version of our core Stories feature two years earlier) was accelerating. Snap had built a genuinely better product. It had a loyal, passionate user base. It had once famously turned down $3 billion from Facebook when most people would have taken the money and left. None of it was enough.Recommended Video Meta controlled the layer beneath Snap: the social graph, the feed, the audience. Once you own that layer, everything built on top bends toward you.We’ve spent more than two decades in tech. We’ve learned to recognize when a pattern repeats.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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