[blennon]

The amazing thing about this new wave of innovation in AI is that the technology is democratized -- anyone can have near state-of-the-art technology to power their applications without paying for it.

One of the lasting principles in the "business of AI" is that the data is the true source of value. If you don't have a monopoly on the data, you're going to have a tough time sustaining a competitive business because everyone else will more or less be able to clone your technology. My PhD advisor taught me this based on his experience founding one of the first really successful neural networks companies, HNC, which was later acquired by Fair Isaac (FICO). HNC put together a consortium of banks in order to train their credit card fraud detection system and maintained a monopoly on the data. FICO still runs this business today and I've heard from recent employees it still runs on the same old single-hidden-layer multi-layer perceptron architecture as it did in the 90s.