I took the opposite conclusion from it. After doing a back of the envelope calculation and concluding AlphaGo Zero 250MW hours of power I concluded we were goi

I took the opposite conclusion from it. After doing a back of the envelope calculation and concluding AlphaGo Zero 250MW hours of power I concluded we were going to see AI monopolies. Someone would develop the best imagine recognition, corner the market and get a stream of profits that allowed them to pour more money into training and round and round we go. As you say it was a depressing thought. If deep feature learning / embedding is really this effective it turns it upside down. We could end up with a AI being constructed from layers you buy off the shelf. Lots of parts coming from different vendors, all competing - not unlike the software stacks we use now. It might even go the MJPEG / AV1 way - large companies get the shits with paying someone for the layers and combine their resources to build a better layer than any one of them could on their own, and they can do it because they are all going do additional training on top and put it to a different use. This is impossibly speculative - but thinking you had to invest in 250MW Hours go build a decent Go machine was equally speculative and not nice. No open source group was going to come up with the next killer Go playing box if turned out that way. Now there is a possibility it may not.