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There are other ways that AI research can become a monopoly without any use of patents or purchases of competitors. For example, a fair bit of research can only be done through heavy computing infrastructure. In some sense places like Google will have an advantage no matter how much of their code is open-sourced (and a lot of it is open source already). Another issue is data, which is a type of capital - much unlike money however - where there is a limit to how much value you can extract from it that depends on your computing resources. These are barriers that I think probably can't be lowered even in principle.
Having advantages in the field of AI research and having a monopoly are very different things.
That's not self-evident to me. A fair bit of practical applications (e.g. Siri/Cortana) require a lot of infrastructure. What kind of research can't you do if you have a few terabytes of storage and a couple dozens of GPUs? What a research university will be unable to do?
Data is an interesting issue. But first, the difference between research and practical ap... (read more)