Machine learning deployment -- Benedict Evans

In 2012 or so, if you'd asked most people in tech about'neural networks', if they had any answer at all they might well have said that it was an obscure idea from the 1980s that had never really worked - rather like VR. Then, in 2013, Imagenet gave us an explosive realisation that this could work now - again, rather like VR in 2013. Since then, the tech industry has been remaking itself around machine learning. There's a naive view that'Google will have all the data' or China will have all the AI' or'Data is the new oil', but it's more interesting to look at how many different kinds of deployment are now happening. The first phase was the creation of companies building platforms (or'primitives' or'substrates') for specific low-level ML applications - image recognition, voice recognition, sentiment analysis etc.