Both of these resources are only really available to big companies. And although some of the most exciting applications, such as OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT and Stability.AI's image-generation AI Stable Diffusion, are created by startups, they rely on deals with Big Tech that gives them access to its vast data and computing resources. "A couple of big tech firms are poised to consolidate power through AI rather than democratize it," says Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research nonprofit. Right now, Big Tech has a chokehold on AI. But Myers West believes we're actually at a watershed moment.