Is AI an agent of big tech hegemony or multi-disciplinary research and innovation?

A recent New York Times article fretting about the soaring costs of developing and training leading-edge deep learning models and my admittedly provocative Tweet questioning the premise and motives of the article's sources led to the type of online banter that indicates a nuanced question ill-suited for pithy Twitter responses. Fears of AI creating a chasm between haves and have-nots are common, however the topic of AI-fueled inequality typically centers on its economic effects, namely that the growing substitution of manual labor with algorithmic automation serves to further polarize income distributions as the knowledge class controlling and using the algorithms get richer while the working class being displaced by machines suffers. Many new technologies -- those we call'automation technologies' -- do not increase laborís productivity, but are explicitly aimed at replacing it by substituting cheaper capital (machines) in a range of tasks performed by humans. As a result, automation technologies always reduce the laborís share in value added (because they increase productivity by more than wages and employment). They may also reduce overall labor demand because they displace workers from the tasks they were previously performing.