Large corporate AI producers can thus not only coexist with, and indeed benefit from, open-source AI development, but can actually weaponize it against competitors (Vorhies 2016b). Google’s TensorFlow can be run on competing (non-Google) clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, but this is likely due to Google being the latecomer to the cloud game. It is now vigorously attempting to take a slice of the market. It is possible that a Google dominant in AI could cajole or coerce developers onto the Google cloud, and TensorFlow could become ‘the Android of AI’ (Gershgorn 2015). Further, as the tech companies themselves admit, open sourcing software can lead to accelerated development and improvements beyond what a single team at a company could accomplish. As one commentator observes:
Free software is good business for these companies, exactly because it allows more people to develop AI. Every big tech company is locked in a battle to gather as much AI talent as possible, and the more people flooding into the field the better. Plus, others make projects with the code that inspire new products, people outside the company find and fix bugs, and students are being taught on the software in undergrad and Ph.D. programs, creating a funnel for new talent that already know the company’s internal tools. (Gershgorn 2018)
Open-source AI projects thus act as ‘on-ramps’ to the proprietorial infrastructures of large AI companies (Asay 2017). Indeed, corporate encouragement of open-source AI is now so high as to compel critics of digital capitalism to worry not only that corporations will quash open-source AI, but also that their encouragement of it will produce malign results, such as the ‘deep fake’ pornography built with Google’s TensorFlow (Gershgorn 2018). So symbiotic have platform capitalism and open-source AI become since 2010 that both critiques may turn out to be true, with the commercially successful products of open-source developers gradually being consolidated under the aegis of large technology companies, while a shadow world of amateur dark-side AI is created on freely available corporate tools. These capital-open-source relationships typify what Paolo Virno terms ‘the communism of capitalism’ (2004: 110): corporations actively fostering a bottom-up, diversified and often free production of goods, and then harvesting this fecundity by commodifying its most successful fruits.
means of cognition
55