Then at that point we've still gotten engineers who have learned and spread that learning to the world.

I would never trust any commercial company with managing the world. My point is merely that there is positives to be found in smart researchers working on these areas. And usually the researchers individually are ethical - in my opinion most people are, it's money that corrupts.

So yes, we should not allow Google to manage the world, but we can still use their ideas and findings to build the "crowdsourced, blabla..." AI I mentioned - and that's the positive perspective of this. The researchers hints to this as well, that they are laying the framework for other to draw inspiration from.
Science is science, how it's being used is up to the people to decide.