In Silicon Valley, where innovation determines everything, one would assume that monopolies with access to the biggest pool of resources—which fund research for said innovations—would always be driving new technological advancements and stay in power. However, a quick look reveals that only one of the top ten companies with the highest market capital in 2000 remains on the list as of 2024, and less than half of the biggest corporations in 1980 are even in the top hundred today.
Yet, this comes as no shock: simply having access to wealth doesn’t guarantee a company’s future success. History has taught us that no matter how powerful a person or entity may be, complacency, misuse, or a general disconnect from current trends may bring the most gigantic titan crashing down. A prominent example is how IBM, a company who had once supplied up to 70% of all business computers, fell from grace due to gradually losing touch with its audience and squandering its money on R&D that yielded a low ROI.
In current years, however, the government has been trying to artificially break up monopolies, evident in the massive number of antitrust lawsuits filed against the biggest corporations of our era: Google, for one, has had three since just 2020. These companies are often described as having “ridden the wave of the internet,” and since their inception, have managed to remain relevant by keeping up with the latest trends and developments in technology. Yet, people wonder if government interference is even necessary. Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, people have begun to question whether these monopolies have stayed too complacent and lack the ambition to ride the next wave of technological development: artificial intelligence.
A notable example is Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Despite being the fourth biggest technology company in the world (and fifth biggest overall), owning a subsidiary that developed the first AI bot to beat a world champion at the board game Go, and publishing a paper that is the cornerstone of modern day artificial intelligence titled “Attention is All You Need” (115010), many people cite Alphabet as having “missed its mark” in regards to artificial intelligence. Alphabet is often criticized for being too content with its current position and not capitalizing on its research in artificial intelligence, despite investing money into AI R&D for over a decade.
Alphabet’s mistake has given opportunities for dozens of startups, including OpenAI, to catch up and arguably even gain a lead on the behemoth that once led AI development, leading us to where we are now. After Alphabet’s failed launch of Gemini, which people speculate was due to increased pressure to compete with ChatGPT, cost Alphabet losses of almost 100 billion, many individuals are asking themselves: In the new revolution of artificial intelligence, is it really the monopolies that are leading the race and edging out small competitors, or the startups, which have a fresh vision of their goals? Nevertheless, the resources big companies have access to are indisputable and can’t be understated. So in the struggle between the big tech and startups over AI, who will emerge victorious?
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