[fromthestart]

You can easily build and train commercial grade neural nets on consumer hardware. Read about, say, a state of the art image recognition net on arxiv, pull an implementation for python in tensor flow or cafe or pytorch or what have you from GitHub (tons of open source), and with nothing more than just a cursory understanding of what you're doing and some basic programming skills, you can run scripts to train and evaluate functional neural networks on your own data set. I've fully trained numerous modern architectures on a single 1080TI to perform image recognition in a matter of days.

All of this is within reach of the average developer. If there's any monopoly, it's over training data, which Google and Amazon happen to specialize in. But even large datasets exist as open source.

From what I can tell, machine learning, the precursor to AI, is here, and both knowlege and implementation are fully accessable to the general populace.