Deals and alliances among Nvidia, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft are tying the AI sector into an increasingly interconnected system. What are the implications for society?
The story traces back to Elon Musk. In the early 2010s he concluded that artificial intelligence could become among the most powerful technologies ever created. He feared that if profit-driven actors gained control of that capability, people would suffer. Musk had been an early investor in DeepMind, the UK-based lab that led early work on artificial general intelligence. After Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, Musk severed ties with the research team. He believed a counterweight was needed, motivated by human welfare rather than corporate profit. He helped launch OpenAI.
"When I interviewed Musk and Sam Altman at the company's launch in 2015, they were adamant that shareholder profit would not be a factor in their decisions."
Today, big companies signing deals and sharing technology make the sector feel more like a single, linked machine than a loose collection of labs and startups. That change raises questions about competition, control and who will set the rules for access to advanced models. Deals include cloud hosting agreements, model licensing and joint research projects that tie infrastructure and expertise across firms. Regulators and independent researchers are watching those arrangements closely.