Maybe state of the art foundation models are hard to do without deep pockets, but applications built on these models are 100x easier to make now than before. I mean, you just tell it what you want. That's lowering the entry barrier for the public. Everyone can get in on it.

Used to be necessary to collect a dataset, create a custom architecture, train many models, pick the best, iterate on the dataset, etc to get to the same results. The work of months or years compressed into a prompt. It's not just artists that are being automated, traditional ML engineers too.

The only solution for ML eng is to jump on top of GPT-3 and its family, no more work left to do at a lower level. I am talking from personal experience, 4 years old project with 5 engineers and 3 labellers was solved at first sight by GPT-3 with no tuning. Just ask it nicely, it's all you have to do now.