Your Deep-Learning-Tools-for-Enterprises Startup Will Fail

I usually write about how to integrate and launch ML/AI in consumer-facing products. However, a large part of my job is building ML/AI developer tools, some of which are open sourced. In this field there is a proliferation of startups whose tagline is a random pick from all permutations of the words deep learning, platform, enterprise, deployment, training, scale, democratize. Their offerings span from data acquisition (data annotation by humans) to data science workbench environments and hosted model deployment. After speaking with many startups and investors about deep learning developer tools, I felt that it would be useful to share some of my thoughts more broadly.