Don’t step on the flowers.

As fractured as Silicon Valley may be, I think we can all agree that no one thinks that “there isn’t enough competition” in AI.

Yet, bizarrely, as per Friday’s Op-Ed in the New York Times, former FTC Director Lina Kahn concluded from Deep Seek's recent success that there is not enough AI competition, and as such, the “Tech Giants” are failing to innovate.

Sigh. Where to begin.

First, Ms. Kahn claims that there isn’t enough competition in AI.

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It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening U.S. geopolitical power in the 21st century.

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WTAF?!?

It’s not just that Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon (and other BigCos) are already competing to build foundation models; so are OpenAI, Anthropic, X.ai, Cohere (to be clear, all still startups, if well-funded), and dozens (if not hundreds) of other companies. Literally every software company I know, large and small, is running at AI as hard as possible.

Perplexity, Cognition, and Mistral didn’t exist three years ago. Isn’t this dynamism the exact result of ferocious competition?

Second, Ms. Kahn argues that this lack of competition is stifling innovation. This claim is so baffling it’s worth quoting at length:

It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors…

Over the last decade, big tech chief executives have seemed more adept at reinventing themselves to suit the politics of the moment … than on pioneering new pathbreaking innovations and breakthrough technologies

But wait, until last week’s DeepSeek moment, wasn’t the most extraordinary flowering of innovation and awe- (and fear) inspiring tech prowess coming almost exclusively from the US-based tech ecosystem — both large and small?

Do you really think that Google and Microsoft R&D are sitting on their hands? Massive deployment of capital against data centers and compute is in no way mutually exclusive from concurrently innovating with the best AI researchers in the world, as they’ve shown.

Here’s the thing: The innovation economy in the US works. We receive extraordinary benefits from small, nimble companies (six years ago, OpenAI had fewer than 100 employees), academia (AlexNet, CNNs, Back Propagation, etc.), and Ms. Kahn’s notoriously un-innovative “Tech Giants”.

These large companies are often more generous than you’d guess. Google published the transformer paper (and countless other AI advances), Microsoft gave us LoRA and Phi-2, and Meta’s Llama has been open from day one. In fact, it’s often argued that these Tech Giants need to stop sharing their advances, as they benefit our adversaries too much.

But even if these Tech Giants don’t lead, isn’t the precise lesson of a DeepSeek that small dedicated groups, whether in China or here, can continue to make shocking advances? Isn’t it provincial to believe that *all* of the critical AI breakthroughs would come from US companies if only the startups weren’t tyrannized by Tech Titans?

Look, I’m not arguing that anti-trust doesn’t exist or that breaking up AT&T was a bad idea. Embedded browsers and App Store monopolies probably aren’t great. And I’m no fanboy of all of Big Tech’s behavior. Far from it. But stifled innovation in AI is just about the weakest argument I could advance against Ms. Khan’s Tech Giants.

I know, I know. Critiquing an overzealous ex-FTC commissioner feels wrong in light of the cruelty and overreach of the current administration and like an unnecessary cut at the already-exiled Biden administration. But… decisions like appointing Ms. Khan are precisely the sort of anti-business missteps that the Dems need to avoid. No more own goals, please.

A thousand flowers are already blooming. We just need to not step on them.

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