[am17an]

> I think a lot of competitive advantage of Google/Facebook in ML is because they have staffed their engineering with people who have studied these things for years (by PhD).

This is not entirely true. Most of their advantage comes from the corpus of data. Of course, I'm not discounting the fact that they're pioneers in the field, but at this stage data is their competitive advantage (hence they open sourced Tensorflow.)

I feel the present state of ML libraries or even distributed system libraries not being a black-box solution and not the "just works" type is a growing pain, and will be evolve into something more accessible/robust in the future. The whole point of it being a "layer of abstraction" is that you don't need to know the details.