Is there a reason that these ML models are being hoarded as "secret sauce" when, for these companies, all the rivals they're concerned about also have all the resources required to build one that's nearly as good? It feels strange that we've got six different tech giants that have all independently spent tons of capital building up the training data required to sell people smart speakers/mobile speech control/etc. with these ML models, without any of them entering into cross-licensing agreements.

It seems like it'd make a lot more sense for Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. to all pool their training data in an "industry working group" to build and license out one "best" model, the way that IWGs are formed to build and license out e.g. AV codecs.

Hang on, everyone's been at this for years now - are we seriously saying that Facebook et-al don't have large training sets for speech transcription? Why are they still labelling this? Why do they need 100's of contractors?

I can see that a couple of folks might be engaged in carefully reviewing low confidence transcription events, but 100's?