There are probably plenty of problems that do not require that much data to solve (e.g. in reinforcment learning). And google doesn't have all the kinds of data

There are probably plenty of problems that do not require that much data to solve (e.g. in reinforcment learning). And google doesn't have all the kinds of data - they didn't own medical imaging data, they had to ask for it. There are some problems where they have advantage (speech / translation) and they 've probably already solved those problems, but their data advantage is not as important as they make it to be. Whats more worrying IMO is that they 're hoarding all the researchers.