alt Hacker NewsIt's not the AI technology itself that is being monopolized, it's the data necessary to train it.
More specifically: when everything you could previously have earned money with is subsumed by AI, the "frontier" of profitable knowledge exists solely with the highest concentration of capital. Because that's where the highest amount of compute and consequently valuable data is.
Already now the idea of the tech being "commoditized" is true only if you exclusively look at the bubble of rich countries. AI-worthy compute is prohibitively expensive otherwise for individuals.
Specifically with regards to the data necessary to train, the AI companies have allowed the earth to be scorched (to say scorched earth tactic is to attribute intent, which I wish to avoid for my point), making clean training data harder to obtain. Essentially, what I do see as intended is the enclosure of an intellectual commons.