While this is true about user data, this is definitely not true in the context of real physical world data.
Getting a picture from the tip of a wind turbine blade is done with a drone in the best case, or a rope access technician in the worst (legacy) case. Analyzing this picture with AI to identify anomalies takes a few seconds. That’s one of my company’s use cases.
In the same way, ask the google maps team about what scales better: flying real airplanes to capture photographic data, or just processing this data to get 3D models...
