Will the cloud eat your AI?

"Abandon all hope ye who enter here" was the inscription Dante read when passing through the gates of hell. Apparently, it's also true of anyone but the big cloud providers when it comes to artificial intelligence, according to an analysis by Bain & Company. "The CSPs [cloud service providers] are best positioned because of the significant head start they have in using AI on a large scale," the report authors stated. Given that FirstMark investor Matt Turck recently called out how well startups have done in the shadows of the cloud giants, it's worth diving deeper into the strengths the clouds bring to AI. "CSPs' cloud and digital services have given them access to the enormous amounts of data required to effectively train AI models," the authors concluded. Such economies of scale have been an asset to the cloud providers for years.