When I was interning at eBay a few years ago, they were doing some amazing work. I worked with the machine translation team and they were doing cutting edge res

When I was interning at eBay a few years ago, they were doing some amazing work. I worked with the machine translation team and they were doing cutting edge research all over the place with new patents being awarded regularly (even to interns!). Many of their algorithms like spelling correction were significantly better than the state of the art, in part due to their unique data set. They were also actively rebuilding and rewriting critical services to improve reliability and speed, from their computer vision to their speech recognition to their search engine to their seller tools. They split from Paypal and rebuilt and redesigned the app and the website. They started shipping boxes to sellers with the eBay branding to solve the problem of seller's not having shipping material. They started marketing and selling eBay giftcards in numerous stores. They started curated collections of themed finds on eBay (and ML-generated collections). They were reaching out to major brands to sell on eBay as a storefront. They unveiled a really well done AI chat bot to sell eBay items to users. It's an impressively run shop from a technical perspective at least. I do not think it's fair to eBay or it's current and former employees to say that they've done nothing to make themselves better in the last 15 years.