Adobe, a graphic design software specialist, has been waiting for a year for regulators to authorize the purchase of its young competitor Figma. The agreed price, $20.8 billion, may have seemed like a waste that is less so: since then, Adobe's stock market value has doubled ($245 billion) and generative AI techniques have appeared that have given another dimension to its market. The British authority (CMA), a priori reluctant, as well as the European Commission, have given themselves until December, while the American FCC has left the decision in the hands of the courts.
This uncertainty does not alter the fundamental thing. The acquisition implies a commitment to the expansion of graphic creation tools among small businesses and individual Internet users. Without waiting any longer, Adobe presented its Firefly product in March, aimed at this audience and complementary to the professional market (Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). Firefly uses techniques to train the software to generate images from descriptive text. Compete at a lower price and from a consolidated position with the Dall-E service, from the now famous company OpenAI, inspiring a flowering of marginal companies.
In this sense, the acquisition would clearly be defensive. Competition watchdogs – especially the CMA, which is very wary of other merger initiatives – suspect that bundling Figma within Adobe Creative Cloud could block the market from the entry of new players. Adobe (and Figma) maintain that, on the contrary, it would stimulate the offer of affordable products. Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, has not only rejected the invitation to modify the purchase offer but counterattacks: in his opinion, the acquisition will stimulate the emergence of more and not fewer companies, with the consequent flow of investments.
According to Narayen's thesis, regulators err when they try to block mergers. Rarely, he said, can a young company afford long vegetative growth: "At some point it will have to look for an outlet for its investors, which could be the stock market or be absorbed by another that facilitates the deployment of its capabilities."
Two issues are intertwined here. On the one hand, the acquisition of Figma by Adobe is a test of the attitude of regulators, who have been frustrated by not having responded in time to certain operations that have established the omnipotence of large technology corporations, which are now widely questioned. On the other hand, beyond media curiosity, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI, as it is known in English) poses dilemmas that impact the market and move society. Current examples: infringement of intellectual property rights is increasing, as is the misuse of technology to create fraudulent images that violate privacy.
It is known that the application of AI begins with a large volume of data, which should normally be protected. But when it comes to images, intellectual property is quicksand. When Adobe introduced Firefly in March, it promised that the content used to train its software would be exclusively in the public domain or its copyright would expire. Because – Narayen asked himself – what serious company would take a risk with the generative model if it could incur legal or reputational risks?
These dilemmas are still present. Since March, with the beta version of Firefly, 2 billion images have been generated as a result of so-called artificial intelligence.
