Earlier quoted context omitted.
'It's all just computer code' Are you saying no software has trade secrets? Sure, you can go through some tutorials and learn to build a CNN, or even read more recent research papers and hit bleeding-edge ImageNet benchmarks, but nothing currently public is going to get you close to Google's SDC. You can't pretend this is just about people either, India's at 1.3B and they're far from becoming a world leader.
Most of the time, secrets and other forms of protectionism are techniques used for covering up incompetence, or hiding bad behaviour.
common counterpoints: secrets can be operationally necessary, secrets can create economic value.