[louisdorard]

I agree that making the magic black box is very hard. Automatic model selection, at scale, requires a lot of processing power.

My take is that Azure "just" makes it easier/quicker to run ML experiments, and to deploy models. It's not entirely black box since you have to pick an algorithm and parameters. I expect that once you've run your experiments and found what works best, you should be able to get similar results with an open source implementation of your chosen algorithm. But then you'd still have to deploy your model somewhere — maybe using a platform like yhathq.com which makes things more transparent?