Philippa Kaur

The idea that wealthy dynasties can go to pot in the space of three generations pops up throughout history and around the world. John Dryden, an English poet who died in 1700, mused that “seldom three descents continue good.” In 19th-century America, successful families were said to go from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” in that span of time. A Chinese proverb, fu bu guo san dai (wealth does not pass three generations) captures an identical sentiment.As a rising share of the world’s ultra-rich comes from emerging markets, the three-generation hypothesis is being tested once again—nowhere more so than in developing Asia. Asians are helping to swell the ranks of individuals with fortunes of more than $500m, which rose from 2,700 to nearly 7,100 globally between 2011 and 2021, according to Credit Suisse, a bank. The continent’s tycoons did more than their African or Latin American counterparts to push the developing world’s share of that total from 37% to 52% over the decade. The combined revenue of the continent’s family firms that rank within the world’s 500 biggest such concerns surpassed $1trn last year, according to researchers at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland (see chart 1).Overall, the results of the three-generation test so far look encouraging for Asia’s ageing patriarchs (most are men) as they seek a safe pair of hands to which to entrust their legacy. The grandchildren of the region’s founder tycoons may well be in shirtsleeves, but out of sartorial choice rather than necessity. They are worldlier than their elders, who built their fortunes on local businesses that thrive in periods of rapid economic development, such as construction or natural resources. They often blend the needs of the family business with personal preferences. At the same time, they are keenly aware of their responsibility to avoid the prodigal trap. As they take the reins of their business houses, it is up to them to show whether, in the words of one Asian heir, “you can institutionalise” and, like “a sort of Rothschild”, keep generating wealth over centuries. (Members of the Rothschild family are shareholders in The Economist’s parent company.)To understand what makes these Rothschild wannabes tick, start with education. Most have attended university abroad, particularly in America. Adrian Cheng, grandson of Cheng Yu-tung, a Hong Kong property tycoon, went to Harvard University. John Riady, the New York-born scion of an Indonesian business dynasty, attended Georgetown University, before earning an MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from Columbia University. Isha Ambani, daughter of Mukesh Ambani, graduated from Yale and then Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2018. Foreign education distinguishes the new crop of tycoons from their grandparents, many of whom never completed university. What sets them apart from their parents is their career path into the family business. Like their fathers, Mr Cheng, Mr Riady and Ms Ambani all now work for these. Mr Cheng runs New World Development, the family’s property arm; Mr Riady is chief executive of Lippo Karawaci, the family empire’s property developer; Ms Ambani heads Reliance’s retail operation. But, like plenty of their peers, they took more or less circuitous routes to get there. For many, that means a stint in finance or professional services. Mr Cheng started his career in investment banking, including at UBS, a giant Swiss lender. Ms Ambani was a consultant at McKinsey. Mr Riady worked in private equity. For some others, the bridge is the world of venture capital and tech startups. Korawad Chearavanont, great-grandson of the founder of CP Group, Thailand’s largest private company, launched a tech startup that provides social-media features for apps. Kuok Meng Xiong, grandson of Robert Kuok, a commodity, property and logistics billionaire from Malaysia, runs K3 Ventures, a Singapore-based VC firm. Both in the case of foreign VC investments in Asia and of Asian investments in foreign VC firms, the heirs’ fluent English, foreign education and Western social circles makes them the ideal conduit. And these flows are growing: in the past two years VC investments in Asia averaged $150bn annually, more than half of America’s $280bn or so, and up from $11bn in 2012, when it was a quarter of America’s. The share of investments in VC deals in America coming from Asia has climbed, too, from less than 10% by value a decade ago to around a quarter in 2022, according to Dealroom, a data firm (see chart 2). Permitting the heirs to have a professional life outside the family is often about letting them spread their wings. “The first and second generation were quite traditional,” says Kevin Au, director of the Centre for Family Business at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. But, he adds, they were happy to send their children abroad, “where values are different and business is done differently”, perhaps understanding that not everyone wants to work with their parents. Impact investing and sustainability-related roles are popular among the millennial plutocrats. Rather than join Hyundai Group, Chung Kyungsun, grandson of its founder, Chung Ju-yung, has set up an impact-investment firm called Sylvan Group, which focuses on companies aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals. The shift to more vocally progressive views in some areas, like inequality, may be driven by pragmatism too. “In societies where economic growth isn’t being shared they want to break you up, tax you, regulate you, they presume the worst,” says one business heir.Ensuring heirs’ experience beyond the family concern reflects a more open-minded parenting style. But it is also becoming a business priority for the older generation, especially as the family businesses diversify into new sectors and geographies. Reliance, which made its name in petrochemicals, is now India’s biggest telecoms firm and digital platform. Lippo has gained greater exposure to young technology firms in South-East Asia through Venturra Capital, its VC subsidiary. That young business scions have a wider circle of contacts than do their parents is useful for their families’ firms: rubbing shoulders with would-be startup founders, venture capitalists, consultants and bankers offers opportunity for early dibs on interesting investment opportunities. Last year Campden Wealth, a consultancy, surveyed 382 global family offices, the investment vehicles that manage dynastic wealth. It found that the majority would prefer the next generation of owners to gain external work experience before taking on the reins. More

Artists rarely create more than 5,000 works over a lifetime. Pablo Picasso, who died on April 8th 1973 at the age of 91, produced 25,000. Between 1950 and 2021 more than 1,500 notable Picassos were sold at auction in America and Britain, compared with 798 by the next-most-prolific artist, Andy Warhol, according to Sotheby’s Mei Moses, the art-data arm of the auction house. In its recent London sales, Sotheby’s offered a sculpture, an illustrated book, a cubist bronze cast, some gravure prints and several drawings and paintings, all by Picasso. Prices ranged from under £5,000 ($6,200) to more than £18m. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Rumours of an impending break-up of Alibaba have been swirling for a while. Chinese regulators had long been leery of its market power over the online economy, where its interests spanned e-commerce, digital payments, cloud-computing, entertainment and much else besides. The Communist authorities dislike the idea of anything, let alone a large private business, outshining the party. And the country’s leaders bristled at the high profile of Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, an icon of Chinese enterprise who every now and again dared question their decisions. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

One personality type occupies more attention in the workplace than any other. The “talented jerk”, whose alter-egos include such lovable characters as the “toxic rock star” and the “destructive hero”, is a staple of management literature. These are the people who smash both targets and team cohesion, who get stuff done and get away with behaving badly as a result.So common and corrosive are these characters that plenty of companies spell out a zero-tolerance approach to them. “No jerks allowed,” says CARFAX, which provides data on vehicle histories. Netflix, a streaming giant, is similarly unequivocal: “On our dream team, there are no brilliant jerks.” The careers site of Baird, a financial-services firm, says that it operates a “no assholes” policy.It is totally reasonable for firms to want to signal an aversion to genuine jerks. It may not actually put people off (“No assholes? Well, I guess Baird isn’t the company for me.”). But it sends an explicit message to prospective and existing employees, and reflects a real danger to company cultures. Toxic behaviour is contagious: incivility and unpleasantness can quickly become norms if they pass unchecked. That is bad for retention and for reputation. It’s also just bad in itself. Moreover, the extreme version of the management dilemma posed by the talented jerk rarely exists in practice. The risk that you may be getting rid of the next Steve Jobs is infinitesimal. Just contemplate all the jerks you work with. If you really think they are going to revolutionise consumer technology, create the world’s most valuable company or have members of the public light candles for them when they die, you should probably just go ahead and make them the CEO. But the red-faced guy in sales who shouts at people when he loses an account is not that person. That said, the enthusiasm for banning jerks ought to make people a little uneasy, for at least three reasons. The first is that the no-jerk rule involves a lot of subjectivity. Some types of behaviour are obviously and immediately beyond the pale. But the boundaries between seeking high standards and being unreasonable, or between being candid and being crushing, are not always clear-cut. Zero tolerance is dangerous. You may mean to create a supportive culture but end up in a corporate Salem, without the bonnets but with the accusations of jerkcraft. The second is that jerks come in different flavours. Total jerks should just be got rid of. But they are rare, whereas bit-of-a-jerks are everywhere and can be redeemed. The oblivious jerk is one potentially fixable category. Some people do not realise they are upsetting others and may just need to be told as much. Other people are situational jerks: they behave badly in some circumstances and not in others. If those circumstances are very broad (whenever the person in question is awake, say), then that tells you the problem cannot be fixed. But if jerkiness occurs only at specific moments, like interacting with another jerk, then it may be that a solution exists. If the thing that a talented jerk does really well can be done in comparative isolation or without giving them power over other people, consider it. As the well-known philosophical teaser goes: if a jerk throws a tantrum in their home office and no one is around to see it, are they really a jerk? A third issue is one of consistency. This is not just about what happens when the person declaring war on jerks is also a jerk. It is also about the many other problem types who crowd the corridors of workplaces. Where are the policies that ban constructive wreckers, the people offering up so many ostensibly helpful criticisms that nothing ever actually gets done? Why not zap the brilliant fools who have blinding insights of absolutely no practical value? Above all, what about the pool of nice underperformers who putter along amiably and harmlessly, helping the culture much more than they do the bottom line? Talented jerks stand out, like shards of glass among bare feet: impossible to ignore, problems that have to be solved. Mediocrities are the bigger problem in many firms but are like carbon monoxide, silently poisoning an organisation. Right-minded purists will argue that anything less than zero tolerance towards talented jerks is just pandering to people who behave badly. But right-minded purists will have skated over paragraph three and are a scourge in their own right. Someone ought to write a management book about them.■Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:How to get flexible working right (Mar 23rd)From high-speed rail to the Olympics, why do big projects go wrong? (Mar 16th)The small consolations of office irritations (Mar 9th)Also: How the Bartleby column got its name More

To understand the shift in tone that has taken place in Silicon Valley in recent months, look no further than Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration in February that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency”. It is hardly the kind of language to set the pulse racing—unless you are an employee on the receiving end of it. On March 14th Meta, the tech giant Mr Zuckerberg runs, announced it would fire 10,000 staff—on top of the 11,000 it laid off last November. Meta is not alone. On March 20th Amazon, another tech behemoth, said it would cut a further 9,000 corporate employees, having already let 18,000 white-collar types go. So far this year American tech firms have announced 118,000 sackings, according to Crunchbase, a data provider, adding to the 140,000 jobs cut last year. And more may lie ahead. On March 24th the chief operating officer of Salesforce, a business-software firm, hinted that the company would soon add to the 8,000 lay-offs it announced in January. Investors have cheered tech’s new-found cost-consciousness. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index is up 16% on its recent low point in late December. And there is more to come. Firings since the start of 2022 represent only 6% of the American tech industry’s workforce. Because tech companies continued to hire throughout 2022, lay-offs have only just begun to reduce total industry employment (see chart 1). By comparison, between the peak of the dotcom boom at the start of the 2000s and its nadir at the end of 2003, America’s overall tech workforce declined by 23%, or 685,000 jobs.Still, the recent lay-offs have been widespread and deep enough to warrant two questions. First, who is getting the chop? And second, where are the laid-off workers going? So far techies themselves have been mostly spared, observes Tim Herbert of the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a trade body. Instead, the axe has fallen mainly on business functions like sales and recruitment. These had grown steadily as a share of tech-industry employment in recent years, a telltale sign of bloat (see chart 2). Between the depths of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and peak employment at the start of 2023, the tech sector added around 1m workers. Simply hiring such numbers required hiring plenty of recruiters; as a headhunting rule of thumb, one recruiter can hire 25 new employees a year. Many of those recruiters may now be surplus to requirements. But the specialists are not immune. As part of its lay-offs, Meta will restructure its tech functions in April. Releasing talented tech workers back into the wild could be a boon for other sectors wrestling with digital reinvention. For years unsexy industries like industrial goods have struggled to compete with the tech industry for talent. Now they are pouncing. John Deere, an American tractor-maker, has been snapping up fired tech workers to help it make smarter farm machinery. Last year the firm opened an office in Austin, a thriving tech hub in Texas. Carmakers, increasingly focused on software, are also hungry for tech talent. So are banks, health insurers and retailers.Some of the laid-off techies are also helping fuel a new generation of startups. Applications in January to Y Combinator, a startup school in Silicon Valley, were up fivefold on the previous year. Excitement is particularly strong in the buzzy field of ChatGPT-like “generative” artificial intelligence (AI), which uses complex algorithms and oodles of data to produce everything from essays to artworks (indeed, this is one area where big tech continues to hire enthusiastically). Optimists hope that this technology will, like the smartphone before it, unlock a new wave of creative destruction, as entrepreneurs conjure up a variety of clever applications. The new AIs may in time mean even less need for, say, human marketers. But they could, like other breakthroughs before them, create entirely new job categories—not least in the tech industry itself. ■ More

To understand the shift in tone that has taken place in Silicon Valley in recent months, look no further than Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration in February that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency”. It is hardly the kind of language to set the pulse racing—unless you are an employee on the receiving end of it. On March 14th Meta, the tech giant Mr Zuckerberg runs, announced it would fire 10,000 staff—on top of the 11,000 it laid off last November. Meta is not alone. On March 20th Amazon, another tech behemoth, said it would cut a further 9,000 corporate employees, having already sacked 18,000 white-collar types. So far this year American tech firms have announced 118,000 sackings, according to Crunchbase, a data provider, adding to the 140,000 jobs cut last year. Investors have cheered tech’s new-found cost-consciousness. The technology-heavy NASDAQ index is up by 17% from its recent low point in late December. The companies are hearing the market’s message loud and clear. On March 24th the chief operating officer of Salesforce, a business-software firm, hinted that the company would soon add to the 8,000 lay-offs it announced in January. They have a way to go: firings since the start of 2022 represent only 6% of the American tech industry’s workforce. Because tech companies continued to hire throughout 2022, lay-offs have only just begun to reduce total industry employment (see chart 1). By comparison, between the peak of the dotcom boom at the start of the 2000s and its nadir at the end of 2003, America’s overall tech workforce declined by 23%, or 685,000 jobs.Still, the recent lay-offs have already been widespread and deep enough to warrant two questions. First, who is getting the chop? And second, where are the laid-off workers going? So far techies themselves have been mostly spared, observes Tim Herbert of the Computing Technology Industry Association, a trade body. Instead, the axe has fallen mainly on business functions such as sales and recruitment. These had grown steadily as a share of technology-industry employment in recent years, a telltale sign of bloat (see chart 2). Between the depths of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 and peak employment at the start of 2023, the tech sector added around 1m workers. Simply enlisting such numbers required hiring plenty of recruiters; as a headhunting rule of thumb, one recruiter can hire 25 new employees a year. Many of those same recruiters may now be surplus to requirements. But the specialists are not immune to the efficiency drive. As part of its lay-offs, Meta will restructure its tech functions in April. Releasing talented tech workers back into the wild could be a boon for other sectors wrestling with digital reinvention. For years unsexy industries like industrial goods have struggled to compete with the tech industry for talent. Now they are pouncing. John Deere, an American tractor-maker, has been snapping up fired tech workers to help it make smarter farm machinery. Last year the firm opened an office in Austin, a thriving tech hub in Texas. Carmakers, increasingly focused on software, are also hungry for technologists. So are banks, health insurers and retailers.Some of the laid-off techies are helping fuel a new generation of startups. Applications in January to Y Combinator, a startup school in Silicon Valley, were up five-fold on the previous year. Excitement is particularly strong in the buzzy field of ChatGPT-like “generative” artificial intelligence (AI), which uses complex algorithms and oodles of data to produce everything from essays to artworks—so much so that even big tech continues to hire enthusiastically in the area (see earlier article).Optimists hope that this technology will, like the smartphone before it, unlock a new wave of creative destruction, as AI entrepreneurs conjure up a variety of clever applications. The new AIs may in time mean even less need for, say, human marketers. But they could, like other breakthroughs before them, create entirely new job categories—not least in the technology industry itself. ■To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

What has actually been achieved on this video call? It takes Jared Spataro just a few clicks to find out. Microsoft’s head of productivity software pulls up a sidebar in Teams, a video-conferencing service. There is a 30-second pause while somewhere in one of the firm’s vast data centres an artificial-intelligence (AI) model analyses a recording of the virtual meeting so far. Then an impressively accurate summary of your correspondent’s questions and Mr Jared’s answers appears. Mr Jared can barely contain his enthusiasm. “This is not your daddy’s AI,” he beams.Teams is not the only product into which Microsoft is implanting machine intelligence. On March 16th the software giant announced that almost all its productivity software, including Word and Excel, were getting the same treatment. Two days earlier, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced a similar upgrade for its productivity products, such as Gmail and Sheets. The announcements add to a spate of similar ones in the past month or so from America’s tech titans. OpenAI, the startup which is part-owned by Microsoft and which created ChatGPT, an AI conversationalist that has taken the world by storm, released GPT-4, a new super-powerful AI model. Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing arm, said it will expand its partnership with Hugging Face, another AI startup. Apple is reportedly testing the use of new AI models across its business, including with Siri, its virtual assistant. Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta, said he wants to “turbocharge” Meta’s products with AI. Adding to its productivity tools, on March 21st Google launched its own AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT, called Bard. The frenzy of activity is the result of a new wave of AI models, which are making their way from lab to the real world. No group of companies stands to benefit or lose out more than big tech. All five giants claim to be laser-focused on AI. What that means for each in practice, though, differs. Two things are already clear. The race for AI is heating up. And even before a winner emerges, the contest is changing the way that big tech deploys the technology. AI is not new to tech’s titans. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, quizzed his teams on how they planned to embed it into products in 2014. Two years later Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s boss, started to describe his firm as an “AI-first company”. The technology underpins how Amazon sells and delivers its products, Google finds stuff on the internet, Apple imparts its smarts on Siri, Microsoft helps clients manage data and Meta serves up adverts. The new GPT-4-like “generative” AI models nevertheless look like a turning point. The firing gun sounded in November, with the release of ChatGPT, which became hugely popular thanks to its uncannily human-like ability to generate everything from travel plans to poems. The thing that makes such AIs generative is “large language models”. These analyse content on the internet and, in response to a request from a user, predict the next word, brush stroke or note in a sentence, image or tune. Many technologists believe they mark a “platform-shift”. AI will, on this view, become a layer of technology on top of which all manner of software can be built. Comparisons abound to the advent of the internet, the smartphone and cloud computing. The tech giants have everything they need—data, computing power, billions of users—to thrive in the age of AI, and consolidate their dominance of the industry. But they recall the fate of once-dominant firms, from Kodak to BlackBerry, that missed previous digital platform shifts, only to sink into bankruptcy or irrelevance. So whether or not the AI evangelists are correct, big tech isn’t taking any chances. The result is a deluge of investments. In 2022, amid a tech-led stockmarket crunch, the big five poured $223bn into research and development (R&D), up from $109bn in 2019 (see chart 1). That was on top of $161bn in capital expenditure, a figure that had also doubled in three years. All told, this was equivalent to 26% of their combined annual revenues last year, up from 16% in 2015. Not all of this went into cutting-edge technologies; a chunk was spent on prosaic fare, such as warehouses, office buildings and data centres. But a slug of such spending always ends up in the tech firms’ big bets on the future. Today, the wager of choice is AI. And the companies aren’t shy about it. Mr Zuckerberg recently said AI was his firm’s biggest investment category. In its next quarterly earnings report in April, Alphabet plans to reveal the size of its AI investment for the first time.To tease out exactly how the companies are betting on AI, and how big these bets are, The Economist has analysed data on their investments, acquisitions, job postings, patents, research papers and employees’ LinkedIn profiles. The examination reveals that serious resources are being spent on the technology. According to data from PitchBook, a research firm, around a fifth of the companies’ combined acquisitions and investments since 2019 involved AI firms—considerably more than the share targeting cryptocurrencies, blockchains and other decentralised “Web3” endeavours (2%), or the virtual-reality metaverse (6%), two other recent tech fads. According to numbers from PredictLeads, another research firm, about a tenth of big tech’s job listings require AI skills. Roughly the same share of big tech employees’ LinkedIn profiles say that they work in the field. These overall numbers conceal big differences between the five tech giants, however. On our measures, Microsoft and Alphabet appear to be racing ahead, with Meta snapping at their heels. As interesting is where the five are deciding to focus their efforts. Consider their equity investments, starting with those that aren’t outright acquisitions. In the past four years big tech has taken stakes in 200-odd AI firms. And these investments are accelerating. Since the start of 2022, the big five have together made roughly one investment a month in AI specialists, three times the rate of the preceding three years.Microsoft leads the way. One in three of its deals has involved AI-related companies. That is twice the share at Alphabet (one of whose venture-capital arms, Gradient Ventures, invests exclusively in AI firms and has backed almost 200 startups since 2019) and Amazon. It is more than six times that of Meta, and infinitely more than Apple, which has made no such investments at all (see chart 2). Microsoft’s most important bet is on OpenAI, whose technology lies behind the giant’s new productivity features and powers a souped-up version of its Bing search engine. The $11bn that Microsoft has reportedly put into OpenAI would, at the startup’s latest rumoured valuation of $29bn, give the software giant a stake of 38%. Microsoft’s other notable equity investments include those in D-Matrix, a firm that makes AI technology for data centres, and in Noble.AI, which uses algorithms to streamline lab work and other R&D projects. Microsoft is also a keen acquirer of whole AI startups; nearly a quarter of its acquisition targets, such as Nuance, which develops speech recognition for health care, work in the area. That is a similar share to Meta, which is a more eager buyer than piecemeal investor. As with equity stakes, AI’s share of Alphabet acquisitions have lagged behind Microsoft’s since 2019. But these, plus its equity stakes are shoring up a formidable AI edifice, one of whose pillars is DeepMind, a London-based AI lab that Google bought in 2014.. DeepMind has been behind some big advances in the field. It developed AlphaFold, a system which can predict the shape of proteins, understanding of which is both critical in drug discovery and notoriously hard to ascertain. But it is Apple that is the most single-minded AI acquirer. Nearly half of its buy-out targets are AI-related. They range from AI.Music, which generates tailor-made tunes, to Credit Kudos, which uses AI to assess the credit worthiness of loan applicants. Apple’s acquisitions have historically been small, notes Wasmi Mohan of Bank of America. But they tend to be quickly folded into existing products. As with investments, big tech’s AI hiring, too, is ramping up. A greater share of jobs listed by Google, Meta and Microsoft require AI expertise than they did, on average, over the past three years (see chart 3). Data from PredictLeads suggest that since 2019 nearly one in four of Alphabets’s job listings have been AI-related (see chart 4). Meta came second, at 8%. According to data from LinkedIn, one in six of Alphabet’s employees mention AI skills on their profile—a touch behind Meta but ahead of Microsoft (Apple and Amazon lag far behind). Greg Selker of Stanton Chase, an executive-search company, observes that demand for AI talent continues to be red-hot, despite big tech’s recent lay-offs.All these AI boffins are not twiddling their thumbs. Zeta Alpha, a company which tracks AI research, looks at the number of published papers in which at least one of the authors works for a given company. Between 2020 and 2022, Alphabet published about 9,000 AI papers, more than any other corporate or academic institution. Microsoft racked up around 8,000 and Meta 4,000 or so. Meta, in particular, is gaining a reputation for being less tight-lipped about its work than its fellow tech giants. Meta’s AI-software library, called PyTorch, has been available to anyone for a while; since February academic researchers can freely use its large language model called LLaMA, the details of whose training and biases have also been made public. All this, says Joelle Pinneau, the head of Meta’s open-research programme, helps it attract the brightest minds (who often make their move to the private sector conditional on a continued ability to make the fruits of their labours public). Indeed, if you adjust Meta’s research output for its revenues and headcount, which are much smaller than Alphabet’s or Microsoft’s, and only consider the most-cited papers, Mr Zuckerberg’s firm tops the research league table. And, points out Ajay Agrawal of the University of Toronto, openness brings two added benefits besides luring the best brains. Low-cost AI can make it cheaper for creators to make content, including texts and videos, that draw more eyeballs to Meta’s social networks. And it could dent the business of Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, which are all trying to sell AI models through their cloud platforms. The AI frenzy is, then, in full swing among tech’s mightiest firms. Promisingly for them, their AI bets are already beginning to pay off, by making their own operations more efficient (Microsoft’s finance department, which uses AI to automate 70-80% of its 90m-odd annual invoice approvals, now asks a generative-AI chatbot to flag dodgy-looking bills for a human to inspect) and by finding their way into products at a pace that seems faster than for many earlier technological breakthroughs.Barely four months after ChatGPT captured the world’s imagination, Microsoft and Google have introduced the new-look Bing, Bard and their AI-assisted productivity programs. Alphabet and Meta offer a tool which automatically generates an ad campaign based on the advertiser’s objectives, such as boosting sales or winning more customers. Microsoft is making OpenAI’s technology available to customers of its Azure cloud platform. Thanks to partnerships with model-makers such as Cohere and Anthropic, AWS users can access more than 30 large language models. Google, too, is wooing model-builders and other AI firms to its cloud with $250,000-worth of free computing power in the first year, a more generous bargain than it offers to non-AI startups. It probably won’t be long before AI.Music and Credit Kudos pops up in Apple’s music-streaming service and its growing financial offering, or an Amazon chatbot will recommend purchases uncannily matched to shoppers’ desires. If the platform-shift thesis is correct, big tech could yet be upset by newcomers, rather as they themselves upset an earlier generation of technology giants. The mass of resources that big tech is ploughing into the technology reflects a desire to remain not just relevant, but dominant. Whether or not they succeed, one thing is certain: these are just the modest beginnings of the AI revolution. ■ More

A few years ago More