Might Microsoft’s employment of start-up staff amount to a form of concentration?

Might Microsoft’s employment of start-up staff amount to a form of concentration ?

Zatrudnienie przez Microsoft pracowników start-upów jest badane jako możliwa fuzja (bbc.com)

BBC.com reports that the British Competition and Markets Authority is now in the process of assessing whether Microsoft, having hired a number of Inflection AI personnel, did not effectuate a de facto merger with this start-up and, if so, whether this merger might diminish competition in the market.

Inflection AI conducts research in the area of generative artificial intelligence, which is very much a trending industry seeking to exploit the capacity of large language models, trained on vast libraries of existing data, to create new multimedia in response to user prompts.

The CMA has noted that, in March 2024, key people from Inflection AI, including Mustafa Suleyman (the British pioneer of artificial intelligence) and Karén Simonyan (Inflection AI’s head scientist) left the company and joined Microsoft. Suleyman’s brief with his new employer includes heading the newly created unit handling all AI research and consumer products, including Copilot, Bing and Edge. CMA also notes that Microsoft has executed a “non-exclusive licensing deal” for use of Inflection AI’s models.

A spokesperson for Microsoft has taken the position that hiring of talented individuals is very much pro-competition, and should not be regarded as a merger. Yet the CMA has been taking a sceptical view of what it regards as the dominance of the tech giants in the nascent field of artificial intelligence, believing that it may develop in the direction of a handful of dominant players controlling access to AI resources.

If the CMA does find reasonable evidence suggesting that Microsoft’s hiring practices constituted a de facto merger which may lessen competition, the entire matter will become the object of more detailed proceedings.

One of the takeaways from this bit of news from England is that a company’s employees might be a major competitive asset – not only in the rarefied world of new tech. The Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection has conducted searches in the offices of Jeronimo Martins Polska, Dino Polska, and a number of logistics operators, suspecting collusion in the labour market.