+this. I've implemented a subset of this kind of pipeline before on AWS (image tagging + face identification) using the building blocks that existed last year (it was AlexNet at the time, with a pre-release version of MXNet, because Google hadn't released the trained inception model). Implementing this basic functionality at a basic working level, given the tools Google has released, isn't impossible.
Now, making it production-quality, efficient, scalable, and the rest -- well, y'know. That's why people use cloud-based services in the first place.
But I think there's less fundamental lock-in than you think. Cloudinary, for example, will let you upload an image and get a tag out. ABBYY and OmniPage/Nuance and others offer cloud-based OCR.
I'm biased - I'm at Google this year - so take this with a grain of salt, but while I have the feeling that Google can do it better and more affordably than a small team could do it on their own, I don't think that Google pulling the API would leave people up a creek without a paddle.
Now, making it production-quality, efficient, scalable, and the rest -- well, y'know. That's why people use cloud-based services in the first place.
But I think there's less fundamental lock-in than you think. Cloudinary, for example, will let you upload an image and get a tag out. ABBYY and OmniPage/Nuance and others offer cloud-based OCR.
I'm biased - I'm at Google this year - so take this with a grain of salt, but while I have the feeling that Google can do it better and more affordably than a small team could do it on their own, I don't think that Google pulling the API would leave people up a creek without a paddle.