The big consulting firms have been building in-house ML libraries for common business problems for 3+ years. They don't need to acquire the data startups becaus

The big consulting firms have been building in-house ML libraries for common business problems for 3+ years. They don't need to acquire the data startups because as the article points out, these models are commoditized pretty quickly (especially when you have access to the transactional data of many large multinational companies). There is no secret sauce to ML that makes you any more likely to succeed with it than Accenture -- and they have a much deeper pipeline than you do. ML is a mature capability at all of the enterprise-tier consultancies, and they bundle it with their $100M system deployments. The mid-market consultancies are working on it. There is very little money to squeeze out of this market. We're also a long way off from AGI. Nobody really even has a roadmap to what an AGI would look like. Heck, DNN/ML techniques have been widely-known since the early 90s; they just became practical with access to cloud-scale hardware, so the current situation has been 25+ years in the making.