For perspective, the same thing was said about search engines in 1995. At the time, server-class computers (big DEC and Sun boxes) were expensive. Altavista had a computer nobody could buy. But it turned out, with some cleverness you could use commodity PCs instead. NVidia is doing impressive work to bring the price/performance of hardware down. I think the vast majority of applications will be possible on a startup budget.

I also think data sets will become more common and less critical over time. Unsupervised and reinforcement learning require less external data. And so much data is available openly.