There is a lot to unpack. But let's start with your first point. If the acquisition of DeepMind was just a talent acquisition, why continue to let them publish?
Your second point: how did you get the impression that this market is "mature"? And, going back to the first point, which market do you actually mean to have matured?
Regarding value creation/capturing/sharing, academic naivety, this industry is no different to any other, nor has basic economics changed. Deep Learning is an amazingly powerful new technology that has the potential to change the world. But how you make products/services out of it which we all value, pay for and thus provide the basis of employment is the usual risk/reward cycle ANY business has to subject itself to. More believe in the technology = more investors willing to fund businesses that have negative free cash-flow for longer. Yes, the competitive landscape seems stacked against new entrants, but that is no different to when today's teach behemoths started. And yes, as with any industry, monopolies are not great and, according to Kara Swisher, maybe tech at large, today, is an unhealthy monopoly.
My experience - many are far off and most of the time published tables of different papers are hard to compare. If you make the assertion here of these results to be flawed, I would like to see more substance (code, reproduction,...). And for balance, for the same reason, hard to verify the accuracy of these results without further insight.
Are you saying this is obvious because people have published the exact same benchmarks which are 100% comparable in journals? If so where are they? I have seen quite a few published benchmarks that could not quite be reproduced, tbh. So, again, what makes this "obvious" to you?
If you are asking that question, I guess you must have wondered about this for years, right, in fact nearly a decade? I mean why would Google have bought DeepMind with them publishing in peer reviewed journals for years after? Same for Meta (formerly facebook)? I think there is a well trodden path being followed here ... and I am surprised by your surprise.
I am certainly not going to defend peer review and its inherent flaws. I am also not sure "capitalists" or the market is always as efficient as one might hope or think. But that aside, to my point above, if capitalists were to optimize "money" as you say, how would that fix publishing? Firstly, how would they ascribe a monetary value to Gower's 1998 and his other few papers that catapulted him to the Fields Medal? Are you saying these subject do not matter because no one is bidding for these papers? I fear we would not have published Heisenberg's early papers or the discovery of Penicillin if so. And over what horizon would "capitalists" optimize that monetary value (internal IRR)? Governments usually have to step in for long term IRR projects (e.g. the internet protocol's development was famously funded by DARPA and they keeping "deep learning" alive during the downturns as no one believed in short term returns ...). The UK water system or quite a few train services around the world bear witness to the fact that even in a "capitalist" society, some long term common benefits are hard to fund with short term IRR considerations even pension funds consider reasonable. Taking that observation to its perverse conclusion, if you believe in "capitalists" then you could argue that the current imperfect review system is a side effect of capitalist societies' long term research funding plan (universities, research grants, tax breaks for endowments, student grants, ...).
I just think knowledge sharing is not always compatible with financial interests. And the former, to me, is the public good that academia should attain. But you get no argument from me that peer review is broken. I struggle to think, though, of a better system and doubt "money" is it, tbh.
Nope, they should not. It is academia after all. How would you even do that in, say, pure mathematics? Concretely, I would love to know what the business plan/economic consideration of Gower's 1998 proof of Szemeredi's theorem using higher order Fourier analysis would even look like.