U.K. Competition Watchdog Signals Cautious Approach to AI Regulation

A report published this week by the U.K.'s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) has raised concerns about the potential ways the artificial intelligence industry could become monopolized or harm consumers in future, but stressed that it is too soon to tell whether these scenarios would materialize. The issues raised by the report highlight the difficulties policymakers face in governing AI, a source of both huge potential commercial value and many risks. Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, is pushing for the U.K. to occupy a central role in international AI policy discussions, with a particular focus on risks from advanced AI systems. If the U.K. competition watchdog decides to start taking action against AI developers, tech companies around the world could be affected. The report, published on Monday, focuses on foundation models, which the CMA defines as "a type of AI technology that are trained on vast amounts of data that can be adapted to a wide range of tasks and operations." Examples include text-generating AI models, such as GPT-3.5, the model that powers OpenAI's ChatGPT, as well as image-generating AI models, such as Stable Diffusion.