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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.

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.

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.

"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!

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.

A harder things to get would be GPS data that google and apple collect one everyone.

We still have vastly superior horsepower for learning than today's computers.

Indeed, also let's not forget that we're not (and should not be) competing with computers. What we want are the results we can get together - CAD, CAE with A from Assisted/Aided etc.

"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

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).

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*

Until facebook decides to shut down this api - which is at their sole discretion.

Fundamentally we are being cornered, marked and forced to buy their shit whatever and whenever we need something. We can't do much as individuals but we can expect different syndicates wanting slices from the same pie: China and their soft power government, Russian gov trolls for destabilisation, etc. This makes me think the US governement is well aware and happy with this development, from their geopolitics perspective. It is not liberals vs socialists, it is my shit vs yours to feed 8 billion consumers.

I'm not sure what the alternative is, or what even the problem is? Buying/trading/gifting/sharing shit makes the world go 'round.

You would want to support your local communities / markets maybe, now risking to become invisible or outpowered? It is called biodiversity. Very sad and dangerous for evolution a fully Googled or a fully Amazoned or a whatever monopolised world. Also dangerous: fascism and communism are made of the same metal and come from monopoly of minds and costumes.

"You would want to support your local communities / markets maybe, now risking to become invisible or outpowered? "
With Amazon, sure, there's a point, but that battle was lost 30 years ago with Wal-Mart when U.S. consumers decided they didn't give a shit about their local community, they wanted "low prices". Not everywhere, mind you.
"Very sad and dangerous for evolution a fully Googled or a fully Amazoned or a whatever monopolised world."
I'm not sure I agree. Where's the monopoly? High market share isn't the only criteria. It has to be a case where consumers have little to no choice, which is clearly not true today. Plenty of people avoid Google (I try as much as I can). Amazon also isn't the world's only retailer or cloud computing company by a long shot.
These things might be true tomorrow, but future crime ala Minority Report isn't actually a thing. I'm also not sure it makes sense to give corporate welfare to losers that will waste the capital, when these companies are actually giving customers good service (hence their high market share) and being great at technology (the barrier to entry is about knowledge).
Also, given the number of negative articles about Amazon by current and former employees lately, I wouldn't bet on their braintrust staying in one place.
"Also dangerous: fascism and communism are made of the same metal and come from monopoly of minds and costumes."
I think that equating global corporations with fascism and communism dilutes those terms too much. We are a global society of organizations, it is pluralistic, and it is relatively new. I'm not fond of unregulated global capitalism, but at the same time I think it's much riskier to be ham-handed with laws and regs because someone thinks they know better, unless there's a lot of peer-verified research on the issue.

In principle we are going towards some sort of consolidation aka biodiversity annihilation worldwide, so that there will be 5-7 corporations / governments deciding for we all. It would be good if, say, they had a global superior mission (for example: space colonisation). It is not good if they only act for their own shareholders or bureaucrats (who are they? what they want from us if not enslavement and control?). You don't need fascism or communism in the given forms, it is the principle from which they arise that is emerging from these global consolidations again.

"In principle we are going towards some sort of consolidation aka biodiversity annihilation worldwide, so that there will be 5-7 corporations / governments deciding for we all."
I see very limited evidence of this.
"It is not good if they only act for their own shareholders or bureaucrats (who are they? what they want from us if not enslavement and control?)"
Most shareholders are you and your neighbours. I.e. mutual and pension funds. As an example, nearly all Canadians are all shareholders in various global companies via the CPP, one of the world's largest investors. My mother was an Ontario school teacher and is thus a shareholder in many companies, administered by one of the world's largest institutional investors (OTPP).
Most people who own equity don't want enslavement or control, they just want a return on the money they put in over their lives. Some senior management OTOH do want control/power, and enrich themselves in the process, and top management pay/power remains an open problem.
"You don't need fascism or communism in the given forms, it is the principle from which they arise that is emerging from these global consolidations again."
Again, I don't see this, sorry. The world is not consolidating, it is breaking apart, from my view. And Monopolies are always temporary at best (a few decades).

"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."
They're not legislated as the Official Search Engine of the EU. Microsoft too once had 98% market share. As did IBM.
Also, think of China, where Google has no market share. Baidu will grow and bide its time.
"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."
If you want to entrench the western world to assume Google is a permanent fixture, you write laws and regulations that make that assumption and turn it into a publicly transparent utility. This is how Theodore Vail turned AT&T into a monopoly for nearly 80 years in the USA. It wasn't necessarily "bad", at least for the first 50 years, it consolidated and standardized service, and provided transparency. But AT&T eventually turned against us by blocking future competition, and it took 15 years of fights to break it up. Plus its "transparency" also developed the presumption of letting the government have access to its data carte blanche to spy on its citizens. Personally, I'd rather not have an organization possibly run by Donald Trump know too much about me.
We could also break them up, or put anti-trust fetters on them, but that requires serious scrutiny before doing, as it might lead to massively unintended consequences.
"Until facebook decides to shut down this api - which is at their sole discretion."
Unlikely, given that API is the only reason anyone pays them money.

They're not legislated as the Official Search Engine of the EU. Microsoft too once had 98% market share. As did IBM.
And then what exactly happened? Did competitors beat them on their own market because of superior performance or better regards for the interests of users? Nope. They discovered new markets and solved new problems which made the old markets less relevant. It's not clear to me that this is a process that you can trust will work in the future.
* Personally, I'd rather not have an organization possibly run by Donald Trump know too much about me.*
You mean like Trump Ventures which owns stock of Google, Apple, AT&T, and Tesla (among many others)?
"Until facebook decides to shut down this api - which is at their sole discretion."
Unlikely, given that API is the only reason anyone pays them money.
That argument makes no sense. I as a user don't benefit at all if some analytics company has a contract with Facebook that allows them to access my data. If users should realistically be able to migrate to another service, they need free and automatic access to their data - which Facebook is in no way forced to provide.

"That argument makes no sense. I as a user don't benefit at all if some analytics company has a contract with Facebook that allows them to access my data. If users should realistically be able to migrate to another service, they need free and automatic access to their data - which Facebook is in no way forced to provide."
That's not how it works.
You have rights and easy access to your data - always have. 3rd parties don't get my PII unless I let them. Heck, I can download a ZIP file of everything I've ever uploaded with a single click! It makes zero sense they would prevent you from getting at it, if they did, they'd be breaking their own value prop of a place to share things, which by definition means people need to be able to get at it easily.
Again, this stinks of non-customers trying to interfere with Facebook customers for dubious reasons out of fear.

You have rights and easy access to your data - always have.
And who would enforce such a right if we have no governmental oversight?
If they did, they'd be breaking their own value prop of a place to share things, which by definition means people need to be able to get at it easily.
Facebook's value proposition is people sharing things within the platform. You can perfectly well provide that service and at the same time make it hard for users to migrate their data to a different platform. They already did it in the past. [1]
Again, this stinks of non-customers trying to interfere with Facebook customers for dubious reasons out of fear.
Indeed. In this case, the non-customers are Facebook's users and I believe the fear of entirely justified.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-blocks-contact-exporting-...

> Also, think of China, where Google has no market share. Baidu will grow and bide its time.
That Google has no marketshare in China is due to governmental regulation. It's success is hardly evidence that we don't need governmental regulation.

Trade regulation is a very different thing than government meddling with my data on a private site.

> 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
What a fallacious statement. How is government oversight of these companies going to prevent you from applying your own magical 'data privacy management' spells?

"How is government oversight of these companies going to prevent you from applying your own magical 'data privacy management' spells?"
That depends on what is being overseen by the government.
I have no issue with EU-style or Canadian-style privacy regs for PII. I think that encourages local innovation by ensuring data can stay within a legal geographical territory.
Where I take issue is "AI is scary, please stop these companies from doing things" and by implication thinking that a government (a) is an organization I trust more than the company with what should be done with my data (a massive leap), or (b) provides value by preventing/limiting that organization from offering a services I want based on AI because non-customers somehow think it's scary or might lead to some nebulous monopoly power.
I'm not saying no government oversight is every warranted ever, I'm saying that there's a lot of fear-based desire in this thread for "government save us from Zuck!!" which isn't helpful when people don't even know what specific regulation they're looking for and what the systemic consequences of that would be.

> That depends on what is being overseen by the government.
You must have had something in mind when you generated that bit of fallacious rhetoric.

> Where I take issue is "AI is scary, please stop these companies from doing things"
That's my issue with people like Elon Musk & Sam Altman starting OpenAI, where "Many of the employees and board members are motivated by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence."[1] and also people like Stephen Hawking raising concern about AI of the "Skynet is coming, panic!" style, (he also warned not to respond to aliens a few days ago), it just seems like a lot of the rhetoric is about a state of AI we're most likely 500+ years away from, while it may actually slow down useful research that will lead us there faster...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

I don't think you need oversight if you have a fair playing field for competitors. If switching from Facebook to... that other social network (?.. that's exactly the problem) was as easy as switching which restaurant you eat at, I wouldn't be calling for regulation I would be content using the social network that I thought was good for me. But I can't, because nothing comes close to Facebook.
I feel that if we had broken up Microsoft in the 90's, we'd be in a much better place today. We're still churning out professionals by the millions who are fully dependent on proprietary software to make a living, when nearly equivalent free alternatives do exist for many of them (Office, CAD, Adobe are the biggest). It makes me sad, and Microsoft had a huge hand in that.

For an example of how oversight do nothing for the end user take a look at the Brazilian model of state regulation "agencies" and how they get influenced by the bigger companies.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

You just made me think about a few issues: 1. wouldn't these five be a cute quasi monopoly? (is pentapoly a word?) 2. isn't it brilliant how "they" - including many others, like Musk - make a big fuss about AI that is mostly already open and published, while what we should worry about is data? 3. is there any hope for an open society when most of us nerds - who are supposed to be all rebellious, undergroundy, security aware etc - with a lot of power to build the future can't wait to run into the arms of these big guys? We could use more @dhh type opinions.

wrt 1.: "oligopoly"

The word you are referring to is oligarchy.

>Now that they have announced a partnership which potentially combines all this data together, I feel so much better!
That's not going to happen. Their data is worth too much and it would lose its value if they shared it with competitors.
>Interestingly, the only company which is even making noises about user privacy is Apple. Is it possible they saw something in this partnership that they didn't like?
Apple aren't good at developing software. Having them in on this wouldn't benefit anyone but themselves so I doubt they were even asked. They're a company that makes shiny looking things with shiny looking interfaces.

This has nothing to do with data collection or any other crazy conspiracy theories you are trying to peddle such as Open AI being intentionally excluded etc.
Hell half of your comment does not even makes any sense.
Allowing OpenAI to do "Data audit" LOL are you seriously high on drugs. Do you know what OpenAI is or does?? Nothing with Auditing!
And yet this is the most upvoted comment in this thread along with second one where people have another set of crazy theories about Apple being "magically" superior.

Yet you didn't back your comment up with facts.

Can somebody actually comment/back-up the comments about how open or not this effort is?
I could see legitimate benefits from this kind of collaboration (it's ultimately about the ability to process data, not the data itself, after all) But I do also wonder if this reduces to the banal abuse of personal data that is suggested here.

So you're basically saying that this is a "Cartel on AI".
What I'd like to see is all of the consortium members sign a pledge that none of them will sell or use their AI technology for defense/military purposes (mainly looking at you Microsoft/IBM/Amazon).
I could see how 10 years down the line, the US government tries to co-opt the group to help it in its wars. This needs to be preempted now, in the same way they should've preempted calls for encryption backdoors by adopting end-to-end encryption years before and making it the status quo, before the government even gets a chance to think about it. They mostly failed in doing that, but I hope they won't fail with this.

I wouldn't exclude facebook or google. I'm sure they've got big fat pipes that lead right to the NSA.

They chose their initial partners somehow and did not include OpenAI. Maybe they thought this would make everything too transparent, maybe they see little financial benefits (those are private companies in general aiming to benefit shareholders), whatever. I see no problem with this. I wish OpenAI plays there eventually, but even now some of the partners go beyond what I would expect from a private company on fostering open AI research.
I am however worried that this would make it even easier for a government agency to get bigger and bigger datasets of personal information

Why does it matter whether it is a government agency that has those data sets versus a private corporation?

Because: (1) government can ignore some protections that corporations are supposed to follow and (2) government can act on this in a way corporations cannot (use this information to argue for or issue search / seize warrants, etc.).

>government can ignore some protections that corporations are supposed to follow
Vice versa is also true. Google and Facebook can censor free speech more effectively than any other, legally.
>government can act on this in a way corporations cannot (use this information to argue for or issue search / seize warrants, etc.)
Google and Facebook don't need a search warrant to scour and social engineer billions of people's lives.