Microsoft-OpenAI Partnership Raises Antitrust Concerns, FTC Says

Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI raises concerns that the tech giant could extend its dominance in cloud computing into the nascent AI market, the Federal Trade Commission said in a report released Friday. From a report: The commission said Microsoft's deal with OpenAI, as well as Amazon and Google's partnerships with AI company Anthropic, raise the risk that AI developers could be "fully acquired" by the tech giants in the future.

"The FTC's report sheds light on how partnerships by big tech firms can create lock-in, deprive start-ups of key AI inputs, and reveal sensitive information that can undermine fair competition," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. The FTC has the power to open market studies to glean more information about industry trends. The findings can be used to inform future actions. It's unclear what the agency's new leadership under the Trump administration will do with the report.

OpenAI was a pimple nosed little startup

[TheWho79]

Let me get this straight, OpenAI was a tiny little startup with some sugar daddy founders that produced very little until chatgpt3. In order to realize that vision that needed cash. Microsoft was the only one with deep enough pockets to fund their expansion. Now, Microsoft has such a good LLM themselves, that they barely need OpenAI any more. Meanwhile OpenAI is suckling at the teat of Bing for it's own search engine. This was not a case like Google Killing the Internet in the cradle (how many 1000's of sta

Microsoft has plenty of antitrust problems

[Tony Isaac]

But this isn't really a good case.

The government is saying that because they have both a major cloud computing operation, and has invested heavily in AI, that this violates antitrust law. What is AI, other than another cloud computing service? AI doesn't deserve to be in a category all by itself. It's like suing them for offering both cloud SQL databases and cloud VMs.