If it wasn't for patents you'd never get a moat from technology. Google, Facebook, Apple and all have a moat because of two sided markets: advertisers go where the audience is, app makers go where the users are.
(There's another kind of "tech" company that is wrongly lumped in with the others, this is an overcapitalized company that looks like it has a moat because it is overcapitalized and able to lose money to win market share. This includes Amazon, Uber and Netflix.)
Most modern tech companies are software companies. To them, the means of production are a commodity server in a rack. It might be an expensive server, but that's actually dependent on scale. It might even be a personal computer on a desk, or a smartphone in a pocket. Further, while creating software is highly technical, duplicating it is probably the most trivial computing operation that exists. Not that distribution is trivial (although it certainly can be) just that if you have one copy of software or data, you have enough software or data for 8 billion people.
academic performance is a bad predictor for real world performance
Compare this to the AI ecosystem and you get a huge difference. The architecture of these AI systems is pretty well-known despite not being "open," and there is a tremendous amount of competition.
About RISC-V: What does you think is different about RISC-V vs ARM? I can only think that ARM has been used in the wild for longer, so there is a meaningful feedback loop. Designers can incorporate this feedback into future designs. Don't give up hope on RISC-V too soon! It might have a place in IoT which needs more diverse compute.
Google's Transformer patent isn't relevant to GPT at all. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en
They patented the original Transformer encoder-decoder architecture. But most modern models are built either only out of encoders (the BERT family) or only out of decoders (the GPT family).
Even if they wanted to enforce their patent, they couldn't. It's a classic problem with patenting things that every lawyer warns you about "what if someone could make a change to circumvent your patent".
