It's the case of the vanishing startup: Some of Silicon Valley's most promising names in the fast-developing generative artificial intelligence space are being gobbled up by or tied to the hip of U.S. tech giants. Short on funds, in the past few months promising companies such as Inflection AI or Adept have seen founders and key executives quietly exit the stage to join the world's dominant tech companies through discrete transactions. Critics believe these deals are acquisitions in all but name and have been especially designed by Microsoft or Amazon to avoid the attention of competition regulators, which the companies strenuously deny.

Facebook is spearheading a competition to find new ways to identify computer-altered videos known as "deepfakes." But some artificial-intelligence specialists say the strategy might backfire. Those experts say the contest will probably hasten the already accelerating arms race between the malicious actors using AI to create increasingly realistic faked videos, and the technology companies racing to detect them. "Any algorithm used to identify deepfakes could also be used to make deepfakes better," says Rachel Thomas, a co-founder of machine-learning lab Fast.ai. Already, top artificial-intelligence researchers across the country have been racing to defuse the computer-generated fake videos as fears grow that they could undermine candidates and mislead voters in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.