It would help give China a fairer chance in the AI race. Due to economies of scale and the sheer amount of resources they command, Facebook and Google are able to conduct research that would otherwise be incredibly expensive (e.g. training AlphaZero), and offer incredibly high salaries to lure in researchers. Apparently 80% of all machine learning engineers work at Google or Facebook! Breaking this concentration of machine learning research power would give companies like Baidu, Bytedance and Tencent, which were not broken up and which enjoy strong government support, the chance to catch up and maybe even overtake the remnants of Google/Facebook.
I don't think its fair to underestimate China. Breaking up Amazon or Google would benefit China more than the west. Sure Amazon and Google are possibly too large, but their Chinese counter parts are equally as large and direct competitors. The idea behind breaking these companies up is to encourage market competition but that competition already exists and will not be broken up in China. Somehow Warren always has the wrong solutions but is generally correct in identifying a problem.
But presumably if other companies in the US got as powerful as Facebook/Google, they'd just be broken up too, for the same reasons, no? And if they weren't that big/powerful, they'd lack the economies of scale to do what Google and Facebook are doing now. So any other country with giant technology companies (which in practice right now is just China) would have an advantage.
There are industry consortiums and partnerships and the like. Surely some of these companies could find a way to work together. And surely the U.S. with the NSA could initiate its own Manhattan Project for A.I.
The original poster asked what benefit breaking them up would have, they didn't necessarily ask for a benefit that's something lots of Americans would see as positive. America and its technology companies aren't super popular in many parts of the world in recent years, and people unfond of it would welcome progress in AI technology becoming less concentrated in the US. Maybe a more left-leaning Senator like Warren might see some benefit in power being more evenly distributed globally, rather than concentrated in a few big US tech companies.
