“ Embrace services. There are huge opportunities to meet the market where it stands. That may mean offering a full-stack translation service rather than translation software or running a taxi service rather than selling self-driving cars. Building hybrid businesses is harder than pure software, but this approach can provide deep insight into customer needs and yield fast-growing, market-defining companies. Services c…
Single-focus disruptors bad. Generic consultancy good - with ML secret sauce, possibly helped by hired specialist human insight.
Companies that can make this work will kill it. Companies that can't will be killed.
It's going to be IBM, Oracle, SAP, etc all over again. Within 10 years there will be a dominant monopolistic player in the ML space. It will be selling corporate ML-as-a-service, doing all of that hard data wrangling and model building etc and setting it up for clients as a packaged service using its own economies of scale and "top sales talent" (it says here).
That's where the big big big big money will be. Not in individual specialist "We ML'd your pizza order/pet food/music choices/bicycle route to work" startups.
Amazon, Google, MS, and maybe the twitching remnants of IBM will be fighting it out in this space. But it's possible they'll get their lunch money stolen by a hungry startup, perhaps in collaboration with someone like McKinsey, or an investment bank, or a quant house with ambitions.
5-10 years after that customisable industrial-grade ML will start trickling down to the personal level. But it will probably have been superseded by primitive AGI by then, which makes prediction difficult - especially about that future.