FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan testifies during the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce hearing on the “FY2024 Federal Trade Commission Budget,” in Rayburn Building on Tuesday, April 18, 2023.
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The Federal Trade Commission is on alert for the ways that rapidly-advancing artificial intelligence could be used to violate antitrust and consumer protection laws it’s charged with enforcing, Chair Lina Khan wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday.
“Although these tools are novel, they are not exempt from existing rules, and the F.T.C. will vigorously enforce the laws we are charged with administering, even in this new market,” Khan wrote, echoing a theme the agency shared in a joint statement with three other enforcers last week.
In the op-ed, Khan detailed several ways AI might be used to harm consumers or the market that she believes federal enforcers should be looking for. She also compared the current inflection point around AI to the earlier mid-2000s era in tech, when companies like Facebook and Google came to forever change communications, but with substantial implications on data privacy that weren’t fully realized until years later.
“What began as a revolutionary set of technologies ended up concentrating enormous private power over key services and locking in business models that come at extraordinary cost to our privacy and security,” Khan wrote.
But, she said, “The trajectory of the Web 2.0 era was not inevitable — it was instead shaped by a broad range of policy choices. And we now face another moment of choice. As the use of A.I. becomes more widespread, public officials have a responsibility to ensure this hard-learned history doesn’t repeat itself.”
One possible effect enforcers should look out for, according to Khan, is the impact of only a few firms controlling the raw materials needed to deploy AI tools. That’s because that type of control could enable dominant companies to leverage their power to exclude rivals, “picking winners and losers in ways that further entrench their dominance.”
Khan also warned that AI tools used to set prices “can facilitate collusive behavior that unfairly inflates prices — as well as forms of precisely targeted price discrimination.”
“The F.T.C. is well equipped with legal jurisdiction to handle the issues brought to the fore by the rapidly developing A.I. sector, including collusion, monopolization, mergers, price discrimination and unfair methods of competition,” she wrote.
Khan also warned that generative AI “risks turbocharging fraud” by creating authentic-sounding messages. When it comes to scams and deceptive business practices, Khan said the FTC would not only look at ” fly-by-night scammers deploying these tools but also at the upstream firms that are enabling them.”
Finally, Khan said that existing laws about improper collection or use of personal data will apply to the massive datasets on which AI tools are trained, and laws prohibiting discrimination will also apply in cases where AI was used to make decisions.
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.
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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.
Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.
The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.
The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.