Would having a "license" for companies instead of individual devs make more sense? Imagine Google losing its license to use personal data to target advertisements - this would make them much more sensitive to protecting their users from malicious entities.
I've noticed that the agile model doesn't work well for a lot of technologies too. Things that have been well studied (for example, creating a webapp with X frontend and Y backend, or creating a graphics engine with DirectX) have known costs and estimates. There are answers you can look up on StackOverflow. Not all realms of technology have such luxury.
Is there an alternative to agile that's available out there?
You're wrong. What you're suggesting is there is no merit in going for an O(n^2) sorting algorithm to O(nlogn) and then to an O(n^1.2534) sorting algorithm.
SLAM at a multi-city scale can use mathematical trickery to improve runtime. Sure, a new solver would help - but we don't need it as long as there is another trick up the mathematician's sleeve. Oh, and it's harder to come up with a new solver / technique.
Wait, the neural network encodes within itself probability distributions of the various image patches it has seen. This is sort of like AI.
Approaches in the past used heuristics (like finding edges and upsampling them, etc). Those were fragile systems. In this approach, the system learns what's appropriate on its own.