AI-organisation: a company in kit form?

Companies are becoming increasingly dependent on AI giants, and have to prioritise collaboration over autonomy.

By Kevin Erkeletyan

When you buy a German saloon, the brake pads are made by one supplier and the spark plugs by another. And that’s also the road companies are going down when it comes to AI. “Two or three years ago, we could train models ourselves,” says Pierre-Louis Bescond. It took a few hours to do interesting things. These days, don’t expect to train a GPT 3.5 or a Lama 2 yourself,” says Roquette’s Data Manager, with little nostalgia. “We used to train highly specialised models in terms of content and form, and got results that really stood out from standard solutions. Nowadays, this is less and less the case,” says Jean-Baptiste Girardin, Data Product Manager at Malakoff Humanis.

“GAFAM are dominating the market,” says Pierre-Louis Bescond. “They have the best-performing models.” At the heart of this acceleration is access to GPUs: the graphic processing units that enable computers to compute rapidly. ‘Where we buy one or two, Meta buys 350,000 in one go,” says Jean-Baptiste Girardin. As a result, companies are increasingly buying off-the-shelf solutions. Jean-Luc Leblond, Data Product Manager at Malakoff Humanis, sees “a game between the players.” “Decision-makers are constantly being canvased by publishers.”

And even though at Malakoff Humanis, “there is still the will to keep the expertise in-house,” this co-construction generally involves the biggest players. “We have a strong partnership with Microsoft Azure,” says Pierre-Louis Bescond. “This has enabled us to develop our own GPT, to prevent company data being broadcast on ChatGPT. Generative AI has really enabled publishers to really get back in the game, when their customers were turning away from it.”

Should we talk about outsourcing, or the internalisation of external elements? AI in businesses is built from generic bricks that can be customised. This standardisation is gaining ground as AI becomes more widespread. “Most of our partners, like software publishers, are now integrating generative AI,” says Pierre-Louis Bescond.