The Machine Learning Race Is Really a Data Race
MITSloan Management Review
By Megan Beck and Barry Libert
Machine learning — or artificial intelligence, if you prefer — is already becoming a commodity. Companies racing to simultaneously define and implement machine learning are finding, to their surprise, that implementing the algorithms used to make machines intelligent about a data set or problem is the easy part. There is a robust cohort of plug- and-play solutions to painlessly accomplish the heavy programmatic lifting, from the open-source machine learning framework of Google’s TensorFlow to Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning and Amazon’s SageMaker.
What’s not becoming commoditized, though, is data. Instead, data is emerging as the key differentiator in the machine learning race. This is because good data is uncommon.
