[fest]

The same reason small companies exist at all- they are more nimble and don't require to operate at large enough scale to survive.

IMO, it would be pretty mad to start a company today around general-purpose conversational AI or general purpose photo recognition service. Applying the same technologies for smaller, more specific groups of users is much less risky path.

I highly doubt Google/Baidu will get into business of recognizing manufacturing defects in fidget spinners or analyzing sensory data to predict when a punching press is about to fail.

[crypto5]

> I highly doubt Google/Baidu will get into business of recognizing manufacturing defects in fidget spinners or analyzing sensory data

They will build platforms for:

- IoT - single robotic KIT/SDK, which allows you to easily install sensors and integrate data into rest of the platform

- Cloud ML - image recognition/models optimization - will allow to train model and detect defects from previous step by two mouse clicks

and take a lot of added value from small companies.