There are two schools of thought about the market impact of Big Data and artificial intelligence, although, paradoxically, both may be simultaneously true.
The first says that only the biggest tech companies know how to swim in the deep end of AI. To build state of the art models requires massive amounts of data, computational power, expertise and capital. Only the likes of Google and Microsoft in the US and Alibaba and Tencent in China can ever hope to make a splash.
The second argues that AI, like almost every other modern technology, will eventually become “democratised”. The tech companies are themselves empowering others to access powerful AI tools, such as Facebook’s PyTorch and Google’s TensorFlow, and cloud computing. Researchers are becoming better at building smarter models with less data. Traditional companies with specific industry expertise and innovative start-ups with entrepreneurial vim can also dive into the AI pool.