Well, the tools are free and open source, and other pretrained models are available for download. All that’s missing is an expensive PhD or two to make sense of

Well, the tools are free and open source, and other pretrained models are available for download. All that’s missing is an expensive PhD or two to make sense of it all, so that option is also available. You can do ML/DL on Google Cloud too in a completely portable way, using, for instance, Facebook’s PyTorch and pretrained models for it. You will discover, however, that it’s much harder and much more expensive to get anything usable that way, without Google doing most of the yak shaving for you, even though PyTorch is much easier to use than TF.