[cm2012]

Facebook and Google use ML as a core part of their products? and they're some of the biggest companies in the world, so...

[duskwuff]

Right, but the ML they use is largely developed in-house. It's not part of a prepackaged ML "product" provided by an outside group.

[sgt101]

My experience is that applying the ML to a domain is 99/100ths of the job; once you've got some traction with well known methods it's time to develop techniques that address their failings. But, any company that's done the hard yards of getting something working is definitely adding value. A good example is NLP, there's no rocket science in building embeddings, but any company that can build a specialist embedding for an important domain (medicine, engineering, finance) has an interesting and useful artefact that might be worth paying for (probably not as much as they would like though).

[kristianc]

Right, and it's only reasonable to expect that if ML is a core differentiator for them, it wouldn't be provided by an outside group.