From Dark Reading
Microsoft Wants You to Watch What It Says, Not What It Does
By Steve Weber
Amid mounting criticisms and regulatory scrutiny of its anticompetitive practices, Microsoft, at the end of February, announced a set of AI Access Principles that it says will guide its relationships and business practices in the new artificial intelligence (AI) economy.
The principles were introduced by company president Brad Smith at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to frame Microsoft’s recent AI investments and programs across Europe, including a partnership with the French company Mistral AI, which has already drawn the attention of European regulators.
If the goal is to promote greater competition and innovation in the AI ecosystem, there is a lot to like in what Microsoft says it aims to achieve. The problem is that innovation and competition are not advanced by words alone. Microsoft, over the past several years, has built a de facto “walled garden” around OpenAI through a series of investments totaling more than $13 billion. These came, in part, as Azure cloud credits that bound OpenAI into developing its models on Microsoft’s closed cloud computing platform...
Steven Weber is a professor emeritus of the I School, retiring in 2021. He previously served as the faculty director at the Center for Long Term Cybersecurity (CLTC).
