Regulation of Artificial Intelligence: Ensuring competition in the AI value chain

• Alain de Serres – Acting Director, Policy and Research Branch, Economics Department, OECD
• Geraldine Mahieu – Director, Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, European Commission

Amelia Fletcher, Professor of Competition Policy, Norwich Business School, UK

Foundation models (FMs) are AI models trained on extremely large datasets. This characteristic allows them to be fine-tuned to undertake a variety of tasks, making them a versatile tool. This versatility contrasts with traditional AI models that tend to be task-specific. Hence, they represent a paradigm shift in AI development: developers can leverage a single model for an incredible variety of applications. This session will examine what the competitive landscape for FMs looks like, how this market is expected to evolve, and what barriers new entrants are facing. The speakers will also discuss if any ex-ante policy interventions may be necessary, in addition to competition law enforcement, to ensure that this market remains contestable and supports a dynamic downstream market for AI applications.

Chair: Cristina Volpin, Competition Policy Expert, DG COMP, European Commission

• Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor of Law, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands. 
• Shin-Shin Hua, Assistant Director, Digital Markets Unit, Competition and Markets Authority and 
• Associate Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK 
• Laurence Moroney, Professor, Harvard University and Head of AI Advocacy at Google, US 
• Anton Korinek, Professor, University of Virginia, Department of Economics and Darden School 
• of Business, and Nonresident Fellow, The Brookings Institution, US 
• Yann LeCun, Vice-President and Chief AI Scientist, Meta, US 

The development of AI models requires large amount of data for their training and validation. The size of these datasets is growing at exponential pace and obtaining them is becoming increasingly difficult for multiple reasons, ranging from intellectual property rights to privacy regimes and AI safety rules. In addition, the increase in AI-generated content on the Internet risks deteriorating the quality of publicly available data and is making human-generated proprietary data increasingly more valuable. Hence entrants trying to catch up with established players may be facing even greater obstacles than the first movers in the industry. This session will discuss the difficulties developers are facing in accessing the datasets they need and what role regulation could play in ensuring fair access to such an essential input, while protecting privacy and intellectual property right and maintaining data quality. 

Chair: Jerry Sheehan, Director, Science Technology and Innovation Department, OECD

• Pilar del Castillo, Member of the European Parliament and rapporteur for the EU Data Act, Belgium
• Bertin Martens, Visiting fellow, Bruegel, Belgium
• Francesca Rossi, IBM Fellow and IBM AI Ethics Global Leader, IBM, US
• Clara Neppel, Senior Director, IEEE European Business Operations  

The availability of cloud computing services reduces considerably the need to invest in and maintain expensive infrastructure and gives developers the ability to quickly scale resources up or down to handle fluctuations in demand. Hence AI developers rely on cloud computing providers to have access to the infrastructure, tools, and services that they need to build and deploy AI models and applications. This session will discuss which conditions are necessary for competition between cloud providers to be effective and or which ex-ante policy interventions may have to be introduced to ensure that these conditions are in place.

Chair: Antonio Capobianco, Deputy Head of Division, Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs, OECD

• Élodie Vandenhende, Deputy Head of the Digital Economy Unit, Autorité de la Concurrence, France
• Ian Walden, Professor of Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary University of London; solicitor and Of Counsel, Baker McKenzie, UK
• Solange Viegas dos Reis, Chief Legal Officer, OVH Cloud, France
• Bob Kimball, General Counsel, Amazon Web Services, US

• Cristiana Vitale, Head of PMR Team, Economics Department, OECD