AI's hype and antitrust problem is coming under scrutiny

Last Thursday, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Eric Schmitt introduced a bill aimed at stirring up more competition for Pentagon contracts awarded in AI and cloud computing. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle currently dominate those contracts. "The way that the big get bigger in AI is by sucking up everyone else's data and using it to train and expand their own systems," Warren told the Washington Post. The new bill would "require a competitive award process" for contracts, which would ban the use of "no-bid" awards by the Pentagon to companies for cloud services or AI foundation models. While Big Tech is hit with antitrust investigations--including the ongoing lawsuit against Google about its dominance in search, as well as a new investigation opened into Microsoft--regulators are also accusing AI companies of, well, just straight-up lying.