> Well, I think a lot of competitive advantage of Google/Facebook in ML is because they have staffed their engineering with people who have studied these things

> Well, I think a lot of competitive advantage of Google/Facebook in ML is because they have staffed their engineering with people who have studied these things for years (by PhD). Compare that to flipkart's recommendations. Not entirely true. Google & FB have orders of magnitude more data than flipkart. You can have the smartest ML people on the planet churning out the most clever, advanced ML algos & models, but without enough data, its not going to be useful & effective. I recently attended slashn[0], flipkart's annual technical conference, and spoke to a bunch of their ML folks. They have masters & phd degrees in ML from IITs, IISc and are as smart as they come. Sure, flipkart doesnt have marquee names of the likes of yann lecun, andrew ng, but i wouldnt doubt the ML talent Flipkart has 0. https://slashn.flipkart.net/ https://slashn.flipkart.net/ ps : I dont work for flipkart, but have friends who work in ML teams