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I don't think this is 'democratizing' AI but rather centralizing Google's control of a utility service.

You would have been right if ML would be as accessible as your hypothetical "utility service" implies. It is not, and getting farther from it.

If you compare ML to electricity, we're still in the stages where a few players have found that electrifying their manufacturing plants makes sense. Small players can't afford he investment in machinery and skills. Maybe when the machinery is hidden behind a "utility" provider (which would also bring down the skill level) they will.

What makes it inaccessible? Are GPUs prohibitively expensive? Are pretrained models unavailable? Is the software source code closed off?

I would say training a CNN from scratch or even fine-tuning one takes a lot of domain knowledge and best practices which often are not standardised yet. Besides, we don't even know why they generalise in the first place! See: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03530, https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.11561

I think the limit is developer talent. It's hard to find people with the right background to train an AI model.

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