There's only so many groups that can leverage and profit from costly blackboxes that predict people's behavior. Additionally, i view ML as a hyperscaler version

There's only so many groups that can leverage and profit from costly blackboxes that predict people's behavior. Additionally, i view ML as a hyperscaler version of science: you're trading money (training hw) for expert time. Most of the time FLOSS and other non-capitalistic entities will have few of the former and (reasonably) much of the later. edit: i'm probably being a bit hyperbolic about the usecases for ML. But the hyperscaler thing still holds: most of the interesting usecases i know of could be done more lowtech with more expert knowledge, with more parcimonious usage of stochastic optimization.