Big Tech Companies Forgetting the Importance of Openness in AI: Wheeler
Big tech companies prospered because of openness but now champion exclusionary policies as AI grows in importance, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in a Brookings commentary published Wednesday. AI is app-based and depends on openness in data, computing power and the models themselves, Wheeler wrote.
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Once big tech players became dominant, “they began to behave in ways that contradicted the openness values that enabled their growth,” Wheeler said. “They used openness as a ladder for themselves, and then pulled it up behind them.”
He noted that about two-thirds of the world’s cloud computing capability is controlled by only three companies, “each racing to dominate AI” and spending trillions of dollars on data centers. Policymakers should ask whether these investments are “accelerating capability or establishing the ultimate bottleneck.” Dominant AI models “remain overwhelmingly closed,” even though open models are often cheaper and offer comparable performance, Wheeler argued. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech have found "that closed models capture approximately 80% of usage and 96% of revenue," he said.