(New York) The US government will open investigations to determine whether or not OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft are guilty of anti-competitive practices, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
According to the daily, the Department of Justice will lead investigations concerning the semiconductor designer Nvidia and the American Competition Agency (FTC) will focus on OpenAI and Microsoft.
Contacted by AFP, OpenAI, Nvidia, the Justice Department and the FTC declined to comment. Microsoft did not immediately respond.
Since the launch of the ChatGPT interface in November 2022, a frantic race has begun to gain the upper hand in so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI).
The development of this technology requires colossal investments, mainly in servers and processors to train software, called language models, which will be able to respond to requests in everyday language.
Only a handful of tech giants have the capacity to dedicate the sums necessary to become a legitimate player in generative AI.
OpenAI is very well positioned, because it was the first to offer its ChatGPT interface.
Microsoft also got ahead, thanks to a partnership with OpenAI, by rolling out this technology into consumer products and services, which allowed it to start monetizing its investments.
Nvidia occupies a central position in the semiconductor industry. Its chips, called graphics cards (GPU), are, by far, the most in demand for developing generative AI.
At the beginning of January, the FTC announced that it had launched an investigation into the colossal investments by Microsoft, Google and Amazon in the main generative artificial intelligence start-ups, OpenAI and Anthropic.