advice to independent software developers
Speaking from many years of experience with software development, personally and professionally: There's really nothing special about the stuff that large tech companies do, actually.
In the vast majority of cases where it looks like they have some magical technology that's miles ahead of what's publicly known/available, in reality they're using the same commodity tools and techniques that you are using, they've just papered over the sharp edges with marketing / manual labour / UI design / etc.
Sure, they have more budget, more marketing teams, more developers, more testers (well, hypothetically anyway), more control over the market and so on. That is all true.
But ultimately you could totally build the majority of the things they build yourself, as long as you set realistic goals. (Whether you *should* do that is a case-by-case question, of course...)
advice to independent software developers
@joepie91 I would argue that a lot of enterprise IT departments have so much red tape that they rarely have any bleeding edge tech and if they do it's only for a short time because of how long they lease it.
The only real exception being when that company's business model is having bleeding edge tech in which case places like Amazon and Google just make their own (i.e. building their own TPUs because NVIDIA can't make them fast enough).
re: advice to independent software developers
@KuJoe Honestly, even in those cases the custom thing is usually made with commodity processes and parts (just optimized to their specific needs, as opposed to general-purpose tradeoff choices).
Custom hardware definitely requires some capital investment, but often you can get surprisingly close with stuff like affordable off-the-shelf FPGAs.
re: advice to independent software developers
@KuJoe (Bonus: a frankly shocking amount of 'custom hardware platforms' in large companies are essentially Raspberry Pis or equivalent boards in a trenchcoat, sometimes even repurposed consumer hardware)