- Small business owners and others should foster self-reliance by sharing AI in order to compete.
By Weon-Kyoung Jo
Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) illegally collected users' personal information and used them for online customized advertisements. The Personal Information Protection Commission found that the act was a violation of the law in September and imposed a fine of 100 billion won which is the largest amount ever.
Big Tech (Big IT company) is a global monopolist with a strong foundation in user networks, big data, e-commerce, and information platforms. These companies are using unique artificial intelligence (AI) to provide customized services. Big data is a key asset in generating profits for Google, which collects search data from users around the world, and Netflix, which analyzes customer viewing histories.
Of course, we cannot ignore the benefits of increased productivity and consumer satisfaction brought about by AI and big data. However, violating privacy policy by indiscriminately collecting information should not be justified. The problems of manipulation and misreading in the process of interpreting data should not also be neglected. Destruction of human dignity caused by unconditional trust of data cannot also be overlooked. There is one more thing we cannot neglect. The question is whether revealing the data and establishing a ‘data dam’ for sharing is omnipotent. AI cannot run without data. The problem arises when individuals or businesses do not want to disclose or share their data.
Data sharing activities between individuals and companies are passive and will inevitably be reduced. Only big tech platforms will have strong AI if this situation continues. As a result, they will become more powerful economic giants, creating an income polarization problem.
A new method emerged to alleviate income and asset inequality and seek for better capitalism. The solution is to share the AI, not the data. The data will still be owned and maintained by each entity if only the AI is shared. Economic entities such as sole proprietors, small business owners, and SMEs will still own the data and continue to expand customer touchpoints and fight against big tech by enhancing AI performance. For example, imagine that the franchise headquarters and franchisees, which are increasingly dependent on big tech, unite to build an AI sharing platform. Medical field is the most active sector for AI sharing model. In October 2021, a shared experiment (EXAM project) was published in Nature Medicine. It is said that the performance of one AI sharing platform is better than the 20 individual AI models developed by each hospital. Smaller hospitals with less data benefited more through the experiment and sharing of the AI model. Of course, even the biggest hospitals have also benefited.
Building a user-centered sharing platform rather than a platform led by big tech, is the shortcut to inclusive growth that alleviates polarization in an ecosystem economy where everyone thrives. Healthcare, smart farms, commerce, transportation, finance, manufacturing, robotics, and smart cities can thrive through a trusted AI sharing platform. It is possible to build the largest AI engines at the level of each sector and stage in the global economy and industry in an AI-sharing manner.
A new sharing economy order that maximizes the profits of users and businesses must be created in the foreseeable future to achieve this. It is necessary to foster environments for SMEs to compete against giant platforms with network effects and secret algorithms.
This can reduce the cost of AI development and increase the performance of AI through federated learning. Federated learning is a distributed machine learning technique that can learn AI models in cooperation with each other without directly sharing data that is stored in various devices or institutions. There has been growing concern that the development of the 4th industrial revolution, which is broadly and deeply involved with AI and robots, could widen income gap worldwide. Now we should all stand at the center of the global conversation to build a better capitalism with an AI sharing platform.
