There is plenty of money in it but you need to sell b2b and tp enterprise. That is not fun and as such no one is doing it.
Put another way,if I were trying to do a start up in this space I'd spend 50% of my budget on marketing 25% on a third world data labelling sweatshop, 20% on data pipeline engineering and 5% on sexy ml stuff.
We still don't have enough data and people are still wasting their time with trying to extend algorithms instead of making better training data.
I've worked on a dozen ml projects two of them before Alex net came out and I've never gone wrong by spending 80% of my time creating a dataset specific to the problem and then using whatever algorithm is top dog right now.
Put another way,if I were trying to do a start up in this space I'd spend 50% of my budget on marketing 25% on a third world data labelling sweatshop, 20% on data pipeline engineering and 5% on sexy ml stuff.