How do we democratize the rewards of machine learning?

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For all the research advances in machine learning, it certainly feels like the rewards are still collected by a select group of large tech companies based in traditional tech giant countries (US, China, etc). Furthermore, a large portion of our best ML engineers and scientists are working on systems with the primary objective of manipulating targeted audiences through advertising and social media. To me, this feels like a failing of our community when the same advanced models and techniques could be making a direct impact on climate change or development schemes.