Well not in bulk to its advertisement competitors as you seem to suggest. But as a different revenue stream, data collectors sell the collected information. Don't be naive, of course they do, first customer are governments.
All corporates sell your data. You're a fool to think otherwise, data makes dosh, and you can sell any data for a price.
Data is a commodity.
There are current ten plus folk in the subway carriage I am sitting in right now. Toss me £10 and I'll give you a dataset of ten people of what colour tops they're wearing and what brand of shoe and colour.
its not a misconception. As an advertiser, I can go use meta's tools, target people specifically, and show them ads on meta's platform. While i don't get the CSV dump, but if i can target people with my message, its the same thing. Meta keeps the data AND the distribution. Data brokers have the data but no distribution of attention for that data. Newspapers have distribution but don't have the granualar data for direct targeting.
There are many, many use cases of having a CSV dump of the data, but in reality, all of it boils down to either reselling the data, or marketing a product to the demographic in the data.
The 3rd use case is that of palantir but let's not get distracted.
So, meta is not selling data is like saying netflix is not selling movies (its actually buying them). Technically true, but a shallow understanding.
Really do you care that your daughters are being advertised beauty products at the exact moment that they delete a photo because it's likely that they're feeling low self esteem at that moment? Because that's a service that you used to be able to buy from Meta.
all the labs "clean" their pretraining data, and you can have your pretraining data to be minimally ai generated but also spam synthetic post-training data
I think there's been a recent wave of 'fde-washing' with companies adopting the role (or renaming existing roles) without understanding what made it effective in the first place
Imo, the main responsibilities of the fde role are:
1. get the customer to the business outcome (if the product is insufficient, the fde builds what needs to be built to get the outcome, hence the engineer part)
2. take the learnings back into the product. the expected result of 1) and 2) repeating is your revenue and margin increasing and time to onboard decreasing. if your fdes are building from scratch repeatedly then you're going to be priced like a services business
most companies aren't willing to hire the technical talent that makes a good fde and aren't willing to run their R&D off of their fde team
This isn't an attack on the technology, it's an observation: we're about to, once again, let the same people profit while treating everyone else as cash cows. Just like every other time these people get the chance. Under the cover of "we're doing it for the good of humanity," they line their pockets a little more.
The article explicitly acknowledges the value and the power of AI. The problem isn't the tool, it's that it's in the wrong hands: instead of benefiting everyone, it'll only benefit a handful of people whose interests are in the wrong place.
And about the "ai-isms": maybe the author used AI to structure an idea and source the piece. Refusing to use a tool just because you criticize how it's being used would be missing the entire point. The critique isn't about the hammer, it's about who's holding it and who it's hitting.
I've seen many cases where AI led to ROI with high margins (maybe not enough to justify the entire industry capex though), but they usually share similar features
- AI is a component of a larger product sold
- The product improves the metrics that customers care about, typically autonomously
- The customer is paying for the outcome, regardless of whether or not the product had AI in it
'Copilot' style AI features are much harder to measure ROI on, because they are typically further away from the base metrics that make it easy to measure ROI, and are typically used for specific tasks in a long web of other tasks within a professional job
Hmm compared to film/entertainment yes, but from the perspective of an individual developer worker, your alternatives are not just in film/entertainment
advertisers dont see the personal data they buy for ad placement
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