Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "
Well, YC means, I think, that AI research should not become a monopoly (via e.g. software patents or by buying every competitor). That sounds entirely reasonable to me.
Microsoft means that they want Cortana/Siri/Alexa/Assistant/etc. on every machine and in every home. That's just marketing speak.
Both expressions have nothing to do with democracy, of course.
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 t... (read more)