Microsoft Cognitive Services
I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well thata) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege?b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a feature of the same company to which you just supplied all this training data (after all, you just helped them - in fact you paid them - to identify new markets for their service)c) and hey, that data can also be combined with other data you do not have access to (in the worst case, it is remaining data which was supplied by your direct competitor and effectively completed the picture for the big company)In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success?To be clear, I don't refer to using the cloud services provided by these companies, which are often a lot more useful, because there are explicit clauses to prevent them from using your data for training(as I understand it).