The AI Pyramid: Power at the Top, Layoffs at the Bottom

Beyond productivity, there's a need to reclaim AI for fairness, transparency, and inclusion.

- Sam Ahmed and Sungjong Roh

For centuries, the path to economic mobility depended on land, labor, capital, and enterprise. Those without land or capital once had little choice but to sell their labor. But then came enterprise. Some individuals managed to innovate by combining creativity, hard work, and borrowed capital to build businesses, generate wealth, and climb the ladder out of their economic class.

But in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), that ladder is being pulled away. AI has emerged as the new factor of production, and so the fundamental question is: Who owns it?

This leads us to broader questions: Who decides how it is applied? Is productivity the only goal, or should we also strive for a more just society built on inclusivity, transparency, and integrity? And if that's the ideal, how do we get there?

WHO OWNS AI?

In theory, AI holds the promise of leading to a more affluent and inclusive society. With open-source models becoming widely available, it might seem like anyone can now build their own intelligent system.

In reality, however, deploying production-grade AI still demands three things: massive proprietary datasets, elite technical talent, and powerful computing infrastructure. These are overwhelmingly controlled by big tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, along with Asian players like Alibaba and Tencent.

Most financial institutions do not own this AI "stack." They rent it. Even so-called "open-source" models that are supposedly free often run on commercial cloud services and depend on data curated and stored with the same big players.

This concentration of AI capability in the hands of a few big tech firms raises many problems.