If AI is the high end of programming, then it's the equivalent of saying that a recent manufacturing grad can't build their own car assembly line and has to go to work for Toyota, Honda, et al.
Barriers to entry at the "top" of industries are generally higher than lower down.
I'm sympathetic to the sentiment.
Consumers might benefit from the conglomeration more than from a lot of independent groups each reinventing the wheel or spending resources on duplicative infrastructure.
There are trade offs of course. In particular, I really don't want one single ML platform to have all my data and know me that well.
The metaphor would be that no combination of people will ever be able to compete with Toyota, Honda etc... and if they tried would be acquired or beaten to death by Honda because they are leveraging their massive scale.
But what about Tesla? It managed somehow to compete with Toyota, Honda, etc, although it had to create a new market (market of electric cars) to do it.
Korean cars manufacturers created now mature brands from scratch. All it took was billions of dollars and a couple decades of time. Can a startup do it? No. Is the market locked up? No as well.
Despite the hype and genuinely great technology and growth it's still nowhere near competitive with the big automotive firms.
So while Tesla has definitely driven innovation here, there are still MAJOR hurdles to them being globally competitive.
Further it took Billions and someone like Elon Musk to be able to get even this far, so in that context if even Musk and tons of government dollars can't get there then it's safe to say nobody can.
Tesla isn't competing with Toyota... They are competing with Porsche and Rolls, etc. Further, they are a mess financially and have not proven to have staying power.
Barriers to entry at the "top" of industries are generally higher than lower down.
I'm sympathetic to the sentiment.
Consumers might benefit from the conglomeration more than from a lot of independent groups each reinventing the wheel or spending resources on duplicative infrastructure.
There are trade offs of course. In particular, I really don't want one single ML platform to have all my data and know me that well.