Awesome to hear from somebody close to the source. There's a third option. There are entire industries where automation has not been practical because of the ne

Awesome to hear from somebody close to the source. There's a third option. There are entire industries where automation has not been practical because of the necessity for many hardcoded rules - problems outside of bland image recognition, including those solved by novel architectures like GANs and encoders and such. ML has finally gotten to the point where complex heuristics can be learned to automate those tasks which were impractical previously. Now you can legitimately write and sell ML services which meaningfully analyze, catalogue, and search data in ways that are currently human intensive, but just unique enough that regular programming won't cut it. There will be a proliferation of such businesses in the near future. The first wave is in development now. I've said it repeatedly, and I'll say it again, we are on the verge of an internet-like change in society. ML is poised to take human endeavors to new heights in the next decade...and if innovation and hardware continue to progress, I think the recent proliferation of the ML zoo and associated theory has given us the foundational tools for true AI which we may see in our [distant] lifetimes.