“The democratization of data science” or the “democratization of AI” have long been popular buzz phrases. “Citizen data scientists” poke through open-source datasets finding valuable insights and sharing them with the world out of an individual sense of curiosity. And although this absolutely does happen, the reality is most of the time these democratized advances have not been done by random individuals, but by professionals in their free time. It is a freedom of one sort – not corporate analysis chasing after profit – but not truly democratized in the sense of a curious novice advancing the field on their own.
