Some people believe that there is a lot of innovation coming out of the tech industry these days. I feel differently. We are all dazzled by the natural language processing, bots, AI and speaker devices that we have come to admire. AI has helped make mundane tasks easier and we are all ecstatic. Do we really have a lot of innovation coming out from the tech industry? I submit that is not true. The “deep learning” neural networks we know today are not too far evolved from those invented nearly 50 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppo_Linnainmaa. The processing power has changed but the fundamental technology has not made any significant strides. In my humble opinion, there is lack of innovation, lack of originality and lack of inspiration.
Only incremental improvements are coming out of the big 5 tech companies. Everyone is in a reactive mode. One of them adds AR so everyone has to. One starts training neural networks on recognizing faces, everyone does. Progress is being measured in extremely small bounces in an overall declining market. What started as unique advantages of each are being lost to competitive pressures to do what the other one is doing. It is a declining trend with a dead cat bounce as it is referred to in investment world. (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deadcatbounce.asp). If we are all trying to do the same thing, how will we progress?