The world of artificial intelligence is here, but will every business have a role in it?
Several speakers at a recent AI Summit in Salt Lake City pushed the idea that the more companies involved in the future, the better.
Gov. Spencer Cox said “thousands” of AI companies are needed. Matthew Prince, co-founder, executive chairman, and chief executive officer of Cloudflare, upped the ante, suggesting 500,000. The goal is to have more than just a few as a way of providing more opportunities to improve humanity and avoid a repeat of the ills created by social media’s handful of controlling companies.
“We need to think about what that future looks like, and I think that future that I want to play for is not a world where there are five AI companies. It’s 500,000 AI companies,” Prince said in a fireside chat with Cox. He said he wants to avoid a world “with five big conglomerates that sell us everything” instead prefers one “where everyone — small businesses, large businesses, everyone — competes on a level playing field.”
Cox said Utah “is going to continue to push to lead the nation to prevent anticompetitive actions by all of the big companies that are in this space right now.”
“We need to make sure that we don’t end up with five AI companies,” the governor said. “We need thousands of AI companies in this country.” Later, he added that he wants regulations that prevent these existing large players “from stopping other companies from entering the market. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
Prince said that without a thoughtful approach, we might end up in “a scary world.” One future might evolve into one company that holds the money, one that holds the real estate, one that makes a product, one that transports the product and one AI company that oversees it all — consolidating all commerce.
“That’s an incredibly terrifying world and we should be playing for one where there are lots and lots and lots of players,” he said.
That massive consolidation can be seen on the Internet — he cited Amazon as an example — which he described as “just a warning shot for what’s to come.” AI will apply “enormous pressure” to consolidate the Internet into a small set of players. While many small businesses are essentially aggregators with personal relationships with their customers, Prince said he is not sure that that matters in the future of agentic commerce.
The big AI players are actually capitalizing on what he called “AI doomerism,” in which people are worried that AI will take their jobs or result in a “Terminator”-like environment, so that regulators might limit the number of companies allowed to be in the AI world. “They don’t want 500,000 AI companies,” he said. “They want five or three or two or one, and they’re trying to figure out, how can we make that happen?”
But innovation, competition and market forces need to prevail, he said. “It is a bad world if there are only five AI companies in the future,” Prince said. “It is bad for all of us. We need to make sure that there is real competition. …”
Cox and Prince were among summit speakers worried that AI might follow the path of highly consolidated social media. Prince said the business model for the Internet has focused on “rage-bait” or seducing people to click on certain links and ads that have led people to become angrier or that “preys on some of our biggest weaknesses.”
Cox said he remains pro-Internet and pro-technology but “very much anti-social media,” adding that it has resulted in daughters with eating disorders, sons with pornography addictions, and grandchildren with anxiety and depression strong enough that some have taken their own lives.
The social media model has led to a handful of the most powerful, wealthiest companies in the history of the world, he told the audience. “And what have they been doing? Well, they’ve been basically strip-mining our souls, and, even worse, they’ve been employing our children in their effort to strip-mine our souls. It’s not a pretty picture.
“I know many of you in this room, again I know that tech is your background, but however much you hate social media, you do not hate it enough. You do not hate these companies enough and what they’ve done to us intentionally, knowingly….”
Those companies, he said, acted “under the guise of doing good for humankind” and it has taken a decade for people to discover the harm they are doing to society.
Cox acknowledged he once believed that technological tools would lead to human flourishing and human connection, but instead they have been used “to manipulate us, to divide us and to do significant harm.” He wants an AI future that is focused on improving humanity rather than “making us dumber and worse.”
“The good news is that it’s not too late,” Cox said. “And the best news of all is we stand on the precipice of a new technological revolution. It is here. It is before us.”