>Did you actually read that Medium post? It's idle FUD and speculation that the author of the original 2012 Forbes article lied about the Target incident, witho

>Did you actually read that Medium post? It's idle FUD and speculation that the author of the original 2012 Forbes article lied about the Target incident, without anything to substantiate that claim. It's also evidently written by someone working in data science at Meta, who would naturally have incentive to deny the reality of their industry. Did you? From the article: >[...]The Forbes writer who rehashes the anecdote even describes it as “so good that it sounds made up.” Indeed. >But this is an easy criticism and beside the point, so for the remainder of this article, let’s suppose that the anecdote is true. The bulk of the objections in the article are that a single instance of Target correctly predicting a pregnancy isn't enough evidence to conclude they have some sort of a galaxy-brained AI that can predict pregnancies before the mothers even know. It's far more plausible it randomly guessed someone was pregnant, and got lucky. The comment you quoted has the same issue. It gets way too hung up on the first part, ignores everything else the author wrote, and then tries to move the goalposts to "the conversation is [...] more about such models being in place". That's a huge cope. It's fairly obvious how concerned we should be about such models is proportional to how accurate they are, and the author is trying to harness that with the Target anecdote. Nobody would care if the story was "24 year old man got sent ads for Zyn, without telling Target that he smoked".