US regulators put antitrust scrutiny on Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI

United States regulators will open antitrust investigations against Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia to analyze their influence in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, where the three companies play an important role, according to local media.

This Thursday, CNBC and The New York Times, citing sources familiar with the matter, published that the Department of Justice will investigate whether Nvidia’s behavior has violated antitrust laws, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will analyze the conduct of OpenAI -creator of ChatGPT- and Microsoft, which has invested US$13 billion in the former and has partnered with other AI companies.

Both agencies closed the deal last week and it is scheduled to be completed in the coming days, according to The New York Times.

Senior officials from both organizations were involved in the discussions between the FTC and the Department of Justice, according to a commission official cited by the newspaper.

Both this year and the previous one, euphoria for this technology has predominated among investors, which has led great technological values ​​such as Microsoft, Google or Meta to embark on a race to be leaders in the sector.

In January, Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan announced that the agency would investigate these companies about their investments and the partnerships they are forming.between AI developers and leading cloud service providers”.

For its part, the European Parliament ratified the European Union’s AI law in March, the first in the world to regulate this technology in the world, although it will not come into force until 2026.

A business that will exceed a billion dollars

In fact, just on Thursday, Nvidia overtook Apple and positioned itself as the second most valuable company in the stock market after reaching $3 trillion in capitalization, thanks to the boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

Many analysts predict this business will surpass $1 trillion in revenue within a decade, according to CNBC.

As the American portal points out, AI involves large investments, and the training of this technology requires thousands of specialized chips, most of which come from Nvidia.

In this sense, Meta recently said that it is investing billions of dollars in Nvidia graphics processing units.

The announcement of the investigation comes after on Tuesday a group of employees and former employees of artificial intelligence (AI) companies, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, denounced the companies’ opacity about the possible risks of the cutting-edge technology, alleging take advantage of the lack of an international regulation.

The letter, which was signed by 11 employees and former employees of the company that created ChatGPT and two from Google DeepMind, one of whom previously worked for Anthropic, highlighted that the possible risks of this technology range “from a further entrenchment of existing inequalities, through manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems, which could lead to human extinction.”