6 ms·

Modern machine learning depends heavily on data. If you have 100x the data, your algorithm is going to outperform a superior algorithm in most cases, because th

by Taek 10y ago

Modern machine learning depends heavily on data. If you have 100x the data, your algorithm is going to outperform a superior algorithm in most cases, because the data is the source of the intelligence. It's a big, scary barrier for startups, for innovation, and we're running the risk of creating data superpowers that can't be competed with. Some algorithms don't perform well until they have a threshold of data. When that threshold is attainable only by a company with XXX million users, you inherently get a system where only those companies can innovate on the most cutting edge in machine learning. That's a bad thing for us, especially if we find those companies turning against us. Did Google start putting a liberal spin on search results to try to influence the election? We don't know! But we do know that they are using their position to manipulate ISIS recruitment, which means they aren't afraid to get their hands dirty with this kind of stuff. THERE IS NO OVERSIGHT! And you aren't going to get a search engine that can come close to competing with Google unless you can find a way to match their data volume before you have something competitive. It's a massive barrier. Facebook is enjoying the same sort of entrenchment. I've switched away from Facebook, and now I've lost touch with a lot of friends. They are my friends, why can't I export them? Why can't I export the data that belongs to me, and use it in some open-source format that allows me to reap the benefits of all the work that I spent tracking them down inside of Facebook's private garden? As a society, we need to start addressing these things, or we are going to end up with Internet giants that we don't have the means to get rid of, and that aren't at risk of being out-competed.

crististm 10y ago
Actually the source of intelligence is not the data but the source of data. I've seen Norvig's video myself and while I see that they get better results with brute force on more data, that does not mean that better algorithms don't exist. In fact, I know for sure there are better algorithms (only because we have for example humans that are better than AI on certain tasks) that probably can use the available data in a more intelligent way than brute force, yielding better results in the process.
- Taek 10y ago
  When John Green from Portland, Maine goes to Google and types in a search query for 'dirt on Mayor', I would imagine that Google is going to have an advantage over any algorithm, human or otherwise, that does not have access to things like the fact that it's John Green from Portland, does not have access to all the news coming out of Portland (at least not in the same, automated way that Google does), does not have access to Mr. Green's search history, and does not have data on the results millions of other searches related to 'dirt on mayor'. If you're going to compete with Google as the one-stop-shop for searches, you're going to need to be able to provide search results that are consistently competitive. And I think Google has gotten good enough that you simply can't do that without access to some portion of their moutains of data. Nobody else has search history for every single American, and without that you are going to be crippled when {Random American} tries to search for something.
  - patkai 10y ago
    "If you're going to compete with Google as the one-stop-shop for searches" Agreed. An easy way to test the difficulty of this is to switch to Bing for a week. I actually tried!
  - crististm 10y ago
    I've switched to Duck Duck Go for more than a year and do >=95% of my searches with them. I observed there is a set of results that can be found in all engines but each engine has a smaller set that are not found on the others. For this variety of results I occasionally use both Google and Bing. This variation algorithm that I do, is one that yields better results then sticking with the brute force of either one. It is these "getting out of the box" algorithms that out compete brute force algorithms on the same ground. That means, with guided context your search results improve drastically.
  - sharemywin 10y ago
    A harder things to get would be GPS data that google and apple collect one everyone.
- sharemywin 10y ago
parasubvert 10y ago
"THERE IS NO OVERSIGHT!" Should there be? I'm not quite sure. I mean, personally I feel a lot safer managing my own data privacy with what I give these companies, rather than having a government do it for me. And I'm not exactly a libertarian, I just think it's rational that this should be decentralized, the risk of a company turning against "us" is a lot less than a government, given history. "I've switched away from Facebook, and now I've lost touch with a lot of friends. They are my friends, why can't I export them? Why can't I export the data that belongs to me, and use it in some open-source format that allows me to reap the benefits of all the work that I spent tracking them down inside of Facebook's private garden?" You can. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference All those "What does your friend list say about your love life?" type surveys use it. "As a society, we need to start addressing these things, or we are going to end up with Internet giants that we don't have the means to get rid of, and that aren't at risk of being out-competed." We've heard this a lot over the years, but I've really never seen a case of a company that can't be out-competed. Who is it up to to "get rid" of an organization? On what basis? People stop using their services, and they stop making money is generally how it works. Otherwise, Antitrust law is the main mechanism today, isn't that sufficient? People forget that Google didn't ask permission or get oversight or contact copyright holders when building a search engine. They hooked a couple servers on the web and started crawling it with their algorithm, and replaced other search engines pretty quickly because they had a better service. One could say that it's impossible to compete with Google, but I'm not so sure: Bing is doing fine (if small share), DuckDuckGo is growing, etc. Adding more oversight/regs to the Web just makes it harder to replace these companies. I'm sure plenty wanted to "get rid" of Microsoft in the 90s because of their attitude and growing monopoly, and certainly they were fettered by the U.S DOJ., but looking back, the calls to break them up were a bit silly. No one would have predicted Apple was going to become much, much bigger (some still can't believe it).
- xg15 10y ago
  I just think it's rational that this should be decentralized, the risk of a company turning against "us" is a lot less than a government, given history. Last time I checked, Google search had 98% market share in Germany, Android had 78% market share worldwide. I don't see how you can talk about decentralisation given dominance like that. Whether or not a de-facto monopoly is a bad thing can be argued, I guess. (I personally think it is) But if one is present, I don't see why handing the power to a government that is (in theory) regularly elected and bound to basic rules of conduct and transparency is worse than handing the same power to a private entity which is bound to nothing except the expectation to grow and benefit their share holders. You can. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference* https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference* Until facebook decides to shut down this api - which is at their sole discretion.
tdkl 10y ago
If you lost touch with people because you don't visit certain pieces of HTML code anymore, then they're not your friends. Facebook has skewed the notion of what a "friend" actually is, that's the main part of keeping people behind their fence.
- bloudermilk 10y ago
  As someone who's left Facebook, I respectfully disagree. Without a backup plan in place to keep in touch, quitting FB was akin to losing a large chunk of my address book. Facebook was simply my only means of communication for a significant portion of my acquaintances. It's not about some philosophical debate about what a "friend" is.
  - codyb 10y ago
    I just went through and unfollowed literally every person and group on the site. Then I deleted all my photos (which were very few to begin with) except a photo of an object that looks like a face but isn't me and a photo of the nyc skyline for that longe one (after downloading them all). Untagged myself in everything, deleted every status and post on my wall. Oh yea and every piece of information besides my name. Then I locked down all privacy settings. Now I have AOL instant messenger again, except I barely use it. To be honest, the site is so very much better that way. None of the bullshit memes (which can be rather infuriating), no one can pretend to be me by taking my account. Soon I'll do it with Twitter which is the only other social media I'm on. It's very refreshing.
weaksauce 10y ago
> But we do know that they are using their position to manipulate ISIS recruitment, which means they aren't afraid to get their hands dirty with this kind of stuff To be fair, Google is not cooking the search results, a company under their wing(jigsaw, formerly ideas) is buying ads on search terms related to terrorism. How good a buy deal they get is one thing to consider and I heard there was a grant of Adwords money to that company for this so there is that aspect as well. Buying ads is a whole lot different in my mind than changing the search result algorithm bias. The latter to the two would be a game changing thing.
- Taek 10y ago
  Might be controversial, but I pretty strongly believe that buying ads is in the same category of manipulation as altering search results, with perhaps the caveat that ads which declare themselves as ads are maybe not nearly as bad. Ads manipulate the flow of information going to a person for the benefit of the advertiser. It's taking advantage of a vulnerable person in hopes that they will change their behavior - whether that change in behavior is beneficial is irrelevant.
AsyncAwait 10y ago
> Did Google start putting a liberal spin on search results to try to influence the election? The fact that you think that one of the 2016 presidential nominees is a "liberal" is sad. Don't rely on labels people give themselves, examine their record.

by Taek 10y ago

crististm 10y ago

Actually the source of intelligence is not the data but the source of data. I've seen Norvig's video myself and while I see that they get better results with brute force on more data, that does not mean that better algorithms don't exist. In fact, I know for sure there are better algorithms (only because we have for example humans that are better than AI on certain tasks) that probably can use the available data in a more intelligent way than brute force, yielding better results in the process.

Taek 10y ago
When John Green from Portland, Maine goes to Google and types in a search query for 'dirt on Mayor', I would imagine that Google is going to have an advantage over any algorithm, human or otherwise, that does not have access to things like the fact that it's John Green from Portland, does not have access to all the news coming out of Portland (at least not in the same, automated way that Google does), does not have access to Mr. Green's search history, and does not have data on the results millions of other searches related to 'dirt on mayor'. If you're going to compete with Google as the one-stop-shop for searches, you're going to need to be able to provide search results that are consistently competitive. And I think Google has gotten good enough that you simply can't do that without access to some portion of their moutains of data. Nobody else has search history for every single American, and without that you are going to be crippled when {Random American} tries to search for something.
- patkai 10y ago
  "If you're going to compete with Google as the one-stop-shop for searches" Agreed. An easy way to test the difficulty of this is to switch to Bing for a week. I actually tried!
- crististm 10y ago
  I've switched to Duck Duck Go for more than a year and do >=95% of my searches with them. I observed there is a set of results that can be found in all engines but each engine has a smaller set that are not found on the others. For this variety of results I occasionally use both Google and Bing. This variation algorithm that I do, is one that yields better results then sticking with the brute force of either one. It is these "getting out of the box" algorithms that out compete brute force algorithms on the same ground. That means, with guided context your search results improve drastically.
- sharemywin 10y ago
  A harder things to get would be GPS data that google and apple collect one everyone.
sharemywin 10y ago

parasubvert 10y ago

"THERE IS NO OVERSIGHT!" Should there be? I'm not quite sure. I mean, personally I feel a lot safer managing my own data privacy with what I give these companies, rather than having a government do it for me. And I'm not exactly a libertarian, I just think it's rational that this should be decentralized, the risk of a company turning against "us" is a lot less than a government, given history. "I've switched away from Facebook, and now I've lost touch with a lot of friends. They are my friends, why can't I export them? Why can't I export the data that belongs to me, and use it in some open-source format that allows me to reap the benefits of all the work that I spent tracking them down inside of Facebook's private garden?" You can. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference All those "What does your friend list say about your love life?" type surveys use it. "As a society, we need to start addressing these things, or we are going to end up with Internet giants that we don't have the means to get rid of, and that aren't at risk of being out-competed." We've heard this a lot over the years, but I've really never seen a case of a company that can't be out-competed. Who is it up to to "get rid" of an organization? On what basis? People stop using their services, and they stop making money is generally how it works. Otherwise, Antitrust law is the main mechanism today, isn't that sufficient? People forget that Google didn't ask permission or get oversight or contact copyright holders when building a search engine. They hooked a couple servers on the web and started crawling it with their algorithm, and replaced other search engines pretty quickly because they had a better service. One could say that it's impossible to compete with Google, but I'm not so sure: Bing is doing fine (if small share), DuckDuckGo is growing, etc. Adding more oversight/regs to the Web just makes it harder to replace these companies. I'm sure plenty wanted to "get rid" of Microsoft in the 90s because of their attitude and growing monopoly, and certainly they were fettered by the U.S DOJ., but looking back, the calls to break them up were a bit silly. No one would have predicted Apple was going to become much, much bigger (some still can't believe it).

xg15 10y ago
I just think it's rational that this should be decentralized, the risk of a company turning against "us" is a lot less than a government, given history. Last time I checked, Google search had 98% market share in Germany, Android had 78% market share worldwide. I don't see how you can talk about decentralisation given dominance like that. Whether or not a de-facto monopoly is a bad thing can be argued, I guess. (I personally think it is) But if one is present, I don't see why handing the power to a government that is (in theory) regularly elected and bound to basic rules of conduct and transparency is worse than handing the same power to a private entity which is bound to nothing except the expectation to grow and benefit their share holders. You can. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference* https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference* Until facebook decides to shut down this api - which is at their sole discretion.

tdkl 10y ago

If you lost touch with people because you don't visit certain pieces of HTML code anymore, then they're not your friends. Facebook has skewed the notion of what a "friend" actually is, that's the main part of keeping people behind their fence.

bloudermilk 10y ago
As someone who's left Facebook, I respectfully disagree. Without a backup plan in place to keep in touch, quitting FB was akin to losing a large chunk of my address book. Facebook was simply my only means of communication for a significant portion of my acquaintances. It's not about some philosophical debate about what a "friend" is.
- codyb 10y ago
  I just went through and unfollowed literally every person and group on the site. Then I deleted all my photos (which were very few to begin with) except a photo of an object that looks like a face but isn't me and a photo of the nyc skyline for that longe one (after downloading them all). Untagged myself in everything, deleted every status and post on my wall. Oh yea and every piece of information besides my name. Then I locked down all privacy settings. Now I have AOL instant messenger again, except I barely use it. To be honest, the site is so very much better that way. None of the bullshit memes (which can be rather infuriating), no one can pretend to be me by taking my account. Soon I'll do it with Twitter which is the only other social media I'm on. It's very refreshing.

weaksauce 10y ago

> But we do know that they are using their position to manipulate ISIS recruitment, which means they aren't afraid to get their hands dirty with this kind of stuff To be fair, Google is not cooking the search results, a company under their wing(jigsaw, formerly ideas) is buying ads on search terms related to terrorism. How good a buy deal they get is one thing to consider and I heard there was a grant of Adwords money to that company for this so there is that aspect as well. Buying ads is a whole lot different in my mind than changing the search result algorithm bias. The latter to the two would be a game changing thing.

Taek 10y ago
Might be controversial, but I pretty strongly believe that buying ads is in the same category of manipulation as altering search results, with perhaps the caveat that ads which declare themselves as ads are maybe not nearly as bad. Ads manipulate the flow of information going to a person for the benefit of the advertiser. It's taking advantage of a vulnerable person in hopes that they will change their behavior - whether that change in behavior is beneficial is irrelevant.

AsyncAwait 10y ago

> Did Google start putting a liberal spin on search results to try to influence the election? The fact that you think that one of the 2016 presidential nominees is a "liberal" is sad. Don't rely on labels people give themselves, examine their record.