Vibrant AI Competitive Landscape - Abundance Institute

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 April 2025 Neil Chilson DOWNLOAD PDF 
 Testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust of the Committee on the Judiciary 

 Hearing: Artificial Intelligence: Examining Trends in Innovation and Competition 

 Thank you, Chairman Fitzgerald, Ranking Member Nadler, and subcommittee members for having me here today to talk about the vibrant innovation and competition in the AI ecosystem. I am Neil Chilson, the Head of AI Policy at the Abundance Institute.

 The Abundance Institute is a mission-driven nonprofit dedicated to creating the cultural and policy environment necessary for emerging technologies to germinate, develop, and thrive, and to thereby perpetually expand widespread human prosperity and abundance.

 The current wave of advanced computing technologies, commonly referred to as “artificial intelligence,” have the potential to create enormous economic growth and human flourishing across the United States. The U.S. leads the world in this technology – in innovation, products, companies, and investment.

 It is true that there are important challenges ahead to continued U.S. leadership in AI. 1 But a lack of AI competition is not one of them.

 Indeed, the complex AI ecosystem is vibrant and competitive. The biggest threat to this vibrant competition is overregulation. Existing regulation and threats of regulation hamper disruptive companies and penalize innovation. Policymakers can best expand competition in the AI ecosystem by clearing old regulatory barriers and resisting the impulse to raise new ones.

 AI isn’t a Market or an Industry–It is a Complex Ecosystem

 AI is a general purpose technology – perhaps the most general purpose technology – meaning that AI has applications in all industries. 2 AI will thus shape competition within every industry where it is applied. Often these applications will decentralize and enhance competition. For example, as increasingly powerful generative AI tools lower the barriers to creating high-quality content, expect smaller teams to better compete with larger, more-resourced incumbents. 3 Market conditions or government interventions that reduce the availability of AI tools will limit this pro-competitive effect across industries.

 However, most discussion among competition analysts has focused on analyzing competition within the AI “industry.” Even ignoring the broad application of AI, such analysis is challenging. Artificial intelligence tools are a complex stack of technologies. For example, an AI-powered smartphone application may use an application programming interface (API) to connect to an OpenAI ChatGPT instance running on a Microsoft Azure cloud service that is powered by custom networked computers using Nvidia hardware. Some AI company offerings span layers; others are more limited.

 Each layer of the stack 

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