Companies outside of GDPR-land will have a competitive advantage over those inside of it, especially in the area of machine learning.

From the article: "...one of the first major distinctions the GDPR makes about ML models is whether they are being deployed autonomously, without a human directly in the decision-making loop. If the answer is yes—as, in practice, will be the case in a huge number of ML models—then that use is likely prohibited by default."

If users explicitly consent to it, then it's permitted under GDPR, but what percentage of users are going to do that? Most will be hitting the "decline" button by default on all websites, even if a given application of ML will be beneficial to them.

This is a showstopper for most ML in the EU. If you have an ML startup in the EU....either close up shop or move.