Unlocking the opportunity for small data ML
The group of tech companies famously labeled The Big Nine by author Amy Webb18 are examples of consumer internet companies that have leveraged big data and AI to build world dominance. Amazon, Apple, Alibaba, Baidu, Meta, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Tencent dominate in the digital era because they utilize enormous amounts of user data to power their AI systems.
As network-based AI-first businesses, they have amassed customers on an unprecedented scale because users are happy to co-create and share their data, so long as it is a net benefit to them. For the Big Nine, getting enough modeling data is rarely a problem, and investing in the most advanced ML capabilities is a virtuous circle that enables more market dominance.
For most other organizations – and ML use cases – this sort of scale is unachievable. As we explored in Chapter 1, Exploring Data-Centric Machine Learning the long tail of ML opportunities doesn’...
