Conflicts & Interests in AI

Wikipedia defines the concept of "conflict of interest" thusly: "A situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another."

It has always been a bit of a gray area with investors. In fact, one of the most famous VC quotes of all time turns the notion on its head: "No conflict, no interest," is often attributed to Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr back in the day – it may be apocryphal, it doesn't matter, because it's accurate. Increasingly so.

Whereas investors used to still at least try to adhere, or appear to adhere, to avoiding conflicts in their investments, in walked AI and turn the gray area clear. As in invisible. As in, it no longer matters. I mean, it still does because people and egos are involved. But the reality of our current situation is that all of these AI companies need to raise the maximum amount of money possible, because they're burning the maximum amount of money possible.

Today brings the latest in a long line of recent examples. As Anissa Gardizy, Sri Muppidi, Cory Weinberg, and Amir Efrati report for The Information:

Amazon is in talks to invest $10 billion or more in OpenAI, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The valuation would be higher than $500 billion, one of the people said.

This is big news and yet entirely predictable. Because, well, I predicted it:

It also sure feels like with this latest news we're mere weeks away from Google and/or Amazon investing in OpenAI, completing the ouroboros. Apple? All totally cool, right? Since this isn't "zero sum" per Nadella...

Honestly, I'm mainly impressed by my timing prediction here – that was, in fact, just a few weeks ago – because the investment itself was inevitable. And that's because it follows the news that Microsoft and NVIDIA were investing in Anthropic.