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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 applications is relevant again, and second, data control is mostly fought over at the legal/government level.
It's still the case that a lot of problems in AI and data analysis can be broken down into parallel tasks and massively benefit from just having plenty of CPUs/GPUs available. In addition, a lot of the research work at major companies like Google has gone into making sure that the infrastructure advantage is used to the maximum extent possible. But I will grant you that this may not represent an actual monopoly on anything (except perhaps search). Hardware is still easily available to those who can afford it. But in the context of "democratizing AI&qu... (read more)