AI, unfair trade practices, public signals and HR cartels in the focus of competition authorities

The most significant competition law developments of the past year were summarized by Dr. András Tóth, President of the Competition Council of the Hungarian Competition Authority (GVH). The GVH conducted a sectoral investigation to assess the chances of operating in Hungarian in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI). One of the largest generative chatbots, ChatGPT, for example, was trained in Hungarian only from the Hungarian part of Wikipedia – this means 128 million articles, while the English text of Wikipedia contains 80 billion articles. Thus, in the case of communication in Hungarian, different depth and elaboration of answers are generated, since the application can only be as accurate and correct as it is used and as much raw material as it can work with. Thus, not only in the case of Hungarian, but also in the case of other small languages, the key question is how the digital age affects their survival.

In this respect, the competition authority’s procedure against Microsoft had a useful effect – in this case, the authority examined whether Microsoft informed users with due professional care about the accuracy of the Bing search engine when it integrated its AI assistant, Copilot, into the search engine. As a result of the procedure, Microsoft undertook to create a database containing at least 10 billion Hungarian words from its own resources, which it will make available free of charge, as open source, to anyone who develops a generative AI application. “The decision in the Microsoft case is a good example of how the GVH can use competition law tools to help the Hungarian language prevail in the age of artificial intelligence,” Dr. András Tóth emphasized.