Swati Srivastava | AI and Corporate World Order

This talk focuses on a corporate world order where AI concentrates material resources in a few select corporations while enabling Big Tech firms to shape societal ideas about AI. Over the past decade, firms such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta have invested heavily in AI, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA have exploded in value. To understand corporate ordering dynamics, the talk overviews material concentrations in the AI stack, historicizing the recent dominance of industry vis-à-vis academia in AI model development and tracing the ways that Big Tech pursues acquisitions and partnerships with startups. Ordering also entails dominant ideas, and the analysis focuses on three narratives promoted by AI firms: the need for governments to pursue sovereign AI; artificial general intelligence and existential risk; and corporations as digital defenders. Firms vary in their views on these narratives, but collectively the AI industry pushes for a central role in global order-making. --- Event Details: https://my.princeton.edu/rsvp?id=1970498