why it doesn’t work: the people that know what they’re doing just use open source, and the people that don’t will not get anything to work, ever, even with APIs. [...] Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all trying to sell a MLaaS layer as a component of their cloud strategy. [...] The problem here is a very practical matter; the MLaaS solutions have no customer segment -- they serve neither the competent nor the incompetent customer segment. The competent segment: you need machine learning people to build real production machine learning models, because it is hard to train and debug these things properly, and it requires a mix of understanding both theory and practice. These machine learning people tend to just use the same open source tools that the MLaaS services offer. So this knocks out the competent customer segment. [...] The incompetent segment: [...] http://www.bradfordcross.com/blog/2017/3/3/five-ai-startup-predictions-for-2017