So, wit.ai got bought by Facebook. Any players left in this space that aren't data hoarding companies? Does the market still care for privacy and a close-to-open-source/hackable intelligent assistent?
From your smartphones to your cars to your watches to everything else, it seems like the economy is about getting as much information about you to advertisers/corporations/governments. And data collection looks to be accelerating if anything.
It's like the system is giving us the rope and we are mindlessly putting it around our necks.
The orwellian nightmare was that big brother was going to forcibly install telescreens and listening devices all over your home to deprive you of an ounce of privacy. He never imagined it'd be us installing the telescreens and microphones all over our homes to deprive ourselves of privacy.
Privacy secured.
Also, just because engineers have to jump through hoops to be able to run SELECT on a database, doesn't mean marketroids and sales don't get free rein on using it (or passing it to other parties).
I've participated in adjacent niche markets where consumers 1) most likely work in tech 2) have needs that 99.9% of people don't care about 3) are willing to pay a premium 4) have the means to pay that premium.
It's too bad that there are so few businesses willing to tap into this market. Part of me believes this is a marketing issue, though. I've yet to see a campaign that really nails our core concerns and does so elegantly.
Perhaps: Pay/reward for data sharing, decentralized training, differential privacy, local training and submitting the weights, local fine-tuning of pre-trained model, marketplace of third-party (open source) models, ...
The obsession with cloud-based machine learning is creating half of these problems.