AI’s hype and antitrust problem is coming under scrutiny

On Thursday, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Eric Schmidt introduced a bill aimed at spurring more competition for contracts awarded by the Pentagon in artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Currently Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle Dominate Those contracts. “The way the giants in AI continue to grow is by taking other people’s data and using it to train and scale their own systems,” Warren told Artificial Intelligence Magazine. washington post.

new bill The contract would “require a competitive award process,” which would prohibit the Pentagon from using “no-bid” awards for companies with cloud services or foundational models of artificial intelligence. (The action by lawmakers comes a day after OpenAI announced that its technology will be deployed on the battlefield for the first time in partnership with Anduril, completing A year-long reversal Opposition to the policy of cooperation with the military.

While big tech companies are subject to antitrust investigations, including ongoing litigation Oppose Google’s dominance in search and launch new investigation into Google Microsoft– Supervisory agencies have also accused AI companies of outright lying.

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission took action against smart camera company IntelliVision, saying it produces misrepresentation About its facial recognition technology. IntelliVision promotes its artificial intelligence model, used in home and commercial security camera systems, as operating without gender or racial bias and being trained on millions of images, both accusations the FTC says are false. (The FTC said the company could not support the bias claim and that the system was trained on only 100,000 images.)

A week ago, the Federal Trade Commission made a similar decision claim Targeting the deception by security giant Evolv, which sells artificial intelligence security scanning products to stadiums, K-12 schools and hospitals. Evolv advertises its systems as providing better protection than simple metal detectors and says they use artificial intelligence to accurately screen guns, knives and other threats while ignoring harmless items. The FTC alleged that Evolv overstated its accuracy claims and that its systems malfunctioned in some high-consequence cases, such as a 2022 incident when they failed to detect a seven-inch knife that was ultimately used to stab a student .

These add to FTC complaints September Targeted multiple artificial intelligence companies, including one selling tools to generate fake product reviews and a company selling “artificial intelligence lawyer” services.