Kickback
“Kickback” – a cartoon that illustrates how the circular the recent AI chatbot and big tech deals appear.
In quick succession, Microsoft and Google have announced investments of $10BN and $400M into AI chatbots (respectively ChatGPT and Anthropic).
One of the biggest challenges for companies wanting to use these chatbots is that they will need massive computational support and cloud data storage.
By happy coincidence, both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer these services and there is no intention to make either AI chatbots open to third-party cloud solutions.
While this might be good business for these tech companies, it does seem to represent yet more closed ecosystems, which stifle innovation and cement an oligopoly.
Also, it’s an interesting accounting approach – since the ‘investment’ from these companies is then needed by ChatGPT and Anthropic to pay for the use of these cloud services.
