> Not paying will be even cheaper. They don't need this to obtain the de facto monopoly given the massive costs in training. Even if other companies offer their

> Not paying will be even cheaper. They don't need this to obtain the de facto monopoly given the massive costs in training. Even if other companies offer their own AI, it will be for niche scenarios (like character creation for games), and training will use Big Tech's cloud resources. The massive costs of training is why they will pay, in order to lock out others. If you spend _billions_ in training, who cares about a 10 million dollar dataset? The rest of you argument reads more like a push for exactly what the article calls for. Many companies will not be able to amass large datasets to attempt to compete with large companies if they have to pay for it. What happens if Cool AI Startup spends 50% of their funding on a dataset, but it's useless after months of experiments? Large companies can easily absorb those costs, small companies can't.