The downside is frontier computer science in several domains is decades beyond the state-of-the-art from academic literature. This is the situation that patents were designed to disincentivize.

There is not an obvious path to making this research public again. That's the reality. For open source to be competitive it needs to be approximately as efficient as the best systems we design.

Do you want companies to have incentives to pay researchers even if NDAs and non competes are basically unenforceable? Do you want any communication of knowledge from corporations? Should companies not be allowed to benefit from sometimes huge investments in research?