Back in the tech-friendly US, major AI companies have formed the Frontier Model Forum to self-regulate the industry. Beyond the stated purpose of promoting safe model development, unstated goals include staving off formal government regulation and blocking competition from small firms. This is different from the voluntary agreement many of the same companies recently announced with the Biden Administration.
European anti-trust authorities are increasing their pressure on Big Tech. Last week, the European Commission opened a formal investigation into Microsoft’s practice of bundling Teams with its Office productivity suite, while the French Competition Authority announced an inquiry into whether Apple is using customer data for ad tracking without following the same rules it imposes on competitors via App Tracking Transparency.
Big Tech companies cooperate in some ways but compete in others. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Tom Tom have just released a set of data that could be used to build maps without relying on services from Google and Apple. As location data becomes more precious, other firms have more reason to build their own services.
Amperity has launched Lakehouse CDP, which delivers CDP functions within “lakehouse” data stores including Snowflake and Databricks. Amperity tools for data modeling, data quality, identity resolution, generative AI, segmentation, and performance measurement will send all results to a company’s own lakehouse rather than a separate Amperity-managed database. Modules can be used independently but the real benefit here is that Amperity is one of the few “composable” CDP vendors who offer a complete set of pre-integrated CDP functions.