‘AI for all’ and ‘the Democratisation of AI’ are current buzz phrases in artificial intelligence. But they can mean different things to different groups.
Generally, there is a two-way split. Commercially, they refer to the drive to develop and release new hardware and software tools that open development and innovation to groups beyond data scientists and algorithm authors. For civil society, they reflect concerns that AI is already being dominated and directed by a few very large companies – typically, the usual suspects of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and their Chinese counterparts like Tencent and Alibaba.
Although it is those same technology giants that are mostly delivering these new tools – along with key hardware players like Nvidia and new strongly backed ones like OpenAI – there is a commercial imperative.
As Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s executive vice president of technology and research, recently observed: “If you look at the early unfolding...