Justin Fox, Columnist

How Google and Microsoft Took Control of AI

Early innovators in artificial intelligence needed money and computing power. Guess who has lots of both?

September 9, 2024 at 7:16 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Sign of the times.
Photographer: Liesa Johannssen/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

I’m Justin Fox, and this is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a manually assembled selection of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. Sign up here .

When Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind set out on their artificial-intelligence entrepreneurial adventures in the 2010s, they seemed to believe that tech giants such as Microsoft and Google shouldn’t be allowed to control the powerful tools they hoped to build. As Parmy Olson describes in an excerpt from her new book, Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World: “Both fumbled for novel ways to structure their research labs to protect AI and make benevolence its priority. They promised to be AI’s careful custodians.”