Interesting review. I also would like to share some of my personal thoughts about article and trends in decentralization.
I found a very interesting piece of information that in about 5 years, the mechanical turk market will be obsolete because AI is getting better. This should be taken into consideration while comparing Gems and Effect AI. Gems is clearly decentralized mechanical turk and nothing more. Effect AI is more than a just decentralized mechanical turk as it will be a distributed computational platform that will run deep learning frameworks. This shows a difference visions of 2 projects:

• short-term (Gems) - tries to solve current problem;
  vs
• long-term (Effect AI) - looking in the future and taking progress into consideration.

It is also important to underline that due to high level centralization AI technologies are not accesible by small companies and individuals. This creates a barrier for AI implementation and technological development. I think that centralized organisations try to keep everything in secret in order to keep high profits as long as possible. Thus, centralized companies are not interested in fast AI development.

ICOs (next generation fund rising) created important engine of progress. ICOs allow collecting of money to develop our world in a decentralized way. I wish Effect AI to succeed in decentralization of AI technologies and wish to see more projects like Effect AI with long-term vision.