I've heard, but can't confirm, that photos and videos stored on Google are used to train ML models at Google. So I'm surprised that Google would want to charge at all for this service if it's important.
Were any other company able to get you to store your photos and videos, I wonder if that could dent Google's ML capabilities a bit.
> To use people's random images for training, they would have to be manually annotated by a human (e.g. facial boxes, eyes, nose, mouth, ears drawn in).
That's not true. There is a large and growing body of research on semi-supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised learning that can take advantage of these unlabelled images.
Different learning techniques have different applications. I do not believe those techniques are applicable to the hypothetical use-cases of this dataset.
Perhaps semi-supervised could be utilized, which reduces the required annotation by some factor k, but still leaves it as a function of the dataset.
Self-supervised basically replaces human annotation with machine annotation, making it only applicable to a small subset of tasks in which this is possible (e.g. you could train "guess time from picture" using EXIF timestamp).
Unsupervised is only applicable to very specific tasks.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory. Training how? It's not like people are uploading tagged photos. And what value is that over Google Images (or other services)?
Were any other company able to get you to store your photos and videos, I wonder if that could dent Google's ML capabilities a bit.