I feel like this article does not substantiate its core claim, "clever coders can beat tech giants." The main evidence given by the authors is that because Google lost to a much smaller company, Fast.ai, on a toy problem (training a model to 93% accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset) that small-time AI researchers can beat the big guys at their own game. This feels like a straw man argument and I'm not convinced.
That said, I do think smaller, independent AI research groups can be impactful even if they aren't going to beat Google in a head-to-head competition; they just have to find problems the tech giants aren't working on yet :).
That said, I do think smaller, independent AI research groups can be impactful even if they aren't going to beat Google in a head-to-head competition; they just have to find problems the tech giants aren't working on yet :).