Social Dilemma

I highly recommend the Netflix hit The Social Dilemma and here is a good review from the New York Times. This documentary from Jeff Orlowski explores how addiction and privacy breaches are features, not bugs, of a lot of Internet products. Although the title calls out social networks, this problem exists for many other Internet products built on advertising business models, which sell users’ attention to advertisers.

The main benefit of advertising is that it allows free access to information. Without the income from advertising, creators would have to hide their content behind paywalls, which makes them less accessible to lower-income people and widens the information inequality in society. However, advertising also misaligns the interests of the companies that build products and their users. Without enough counter-balance, companies will inevitably put the interests of their real customers — advertisers — before their users.

One important counter-balance factor is competition — companies that put less emphasis on users will lose market share, which reduces their values to advertisers. However, when the market share is concentrated on the top players, companies will tend to optimize for short-term interests and cause problems both for their users and the whole industry.

This is not the first time we face such a situation. Newspaper, Radio, and TV Broadcasting are all built on the same premise as the Internet. History tells us that the public and the government need to play a more active role in regulating the market when it becomes mature. If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend you read the book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu.

One difference between the Internet and its predecessors is that it has unprecedented power to influence users thanks to the big data and advance of machine learning. TikTok is an example of this and this podcast by Eugene Wei and Sonal Chokshi covers Tiktok from algorithmic and product design perspectives. 

Netflix

Let us switch the topic to the platform that created the hit. I highly recommend you to read this book to No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. Netflix has been famous for its innovative working environment. In the past two decades, it has done two successful transformations — first from DVD rentals to streaming, and then to original contents. In this book, the co-founder of Netflix tries to decode the culture genes of Netflix and how he made Nextflix an innovation hub by increasing talent density and removing processes relentlessly. Here is the podcast of Reed Hasting in a16z about the book. Another interesting content is the dialog between Reed and Chris Anderson.

Reed is not the only founder of Netflix. This video is by another co-founder Marc Randolph about the early history of Netflix.

Interesting Facts

Tabby’s Star. In 2016, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian announced the discovery of weird behavior coming. The star exhibited odd dips in light, which are very irregular and unpredictable. As scientists were not able to figure out the cause, some speculate it is a Dyson sphere created by an alien civilization. Although there are some new pieces of evidence suggesting this is unlikely, people couldn’t stop speculating before the science community could fully understand what happens.

TikTok

Trump’s deadline (09/15) for TikTok to sell its US business is approaching. What is TikTok Worth to Whom and Why is a great essay by Kevin Xu about the potential buyers of TikTok and their motivations. Chinese Government recently put new AI trade rules that prevent TikTok to sell its recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately without the algorithm, the deal would be much less attractive to the US buyers. With only three days left, it is very unlikely that a deal could be made before the deadline.

Other than the recent drama, TikTok is very fascinating because of its fast growth. In fact, it is the fastest social app to reach 1bn users worldwide. Here is a youtube video that visualizes the growth of social network platforms from 2004 and 2020. TikTok appeared only at the end of the video, but its explosive growth was jaw-dropping.

Another interesting thing about TikTok is that it’s the first social network platform to reach popularity both in Chinese and International Markets. This is very unique because previous generations of successful Chinese Internet companies copied their business models from the US, and their successes were mostly limited to China.

TikTok is also much more than a social app. For this topic, I recommend you to read The Video-First Future of eCommerce, a great essay by Connie Chan and Avery Segal on the video eCommerce popularized by TikTok.

Amazon and the impact of technology on gig workers

Let us switch the topic to the largest eCommerce player in the US. Amazon’s Profits, AWS, and advertising is a great essay by Benedict Evans about Amazon’s business models. One interesting fact is that Amazon is much more than just an eCommerce platform now (a pattern for big companies!). In fact, in addition to eCommerce, it becomes the largest 3rd party eCommerce platform and the largest cloud provider, and it also has a thriving “search Ads” business that threatens Google.

As the big tech companies become more and more powerful, they become more and more impactful to human life — not only for their employees/customers but also equally important for their gig-workers. One interesting article I saw this week is that Amazon Drivers Are Hanging Smartphones in Trees to Get More Work. This may sound funny to us, but the people who are doing this are very serious because they depend on the platform for their main income.

When the rules of the platform are unfair to its gig workers, it also will significantly harm their life qualities and eventually backfire the platform. This week a viral article about the miserable life of the couriers who work for Meituan-Dianping — the uber eats in China — puts it under the fire. Please see this TechCrunch report for more details.

Interesting Facts

The New York City Evolution Animation. This great animation show how New York City grew from a small town to the big metropolitan as of today.

Maya Lin is the FIRST woman to design a memorial on the National Mall. In 1981, Lin, then still was an undergraduate, submitted a proposal for the Veterans Memorial, to be built on the National Mall in Washington D.C. H. The design was initially controversial for several reasons: its untraditional design,, Lin’s Asian ethnicity, and her lack of professional experience. Lin defended her design before the US Congress, and a compromise was reached: The Three Soldiers, a bronze depiction of a group of soldiers; and an American flag were placed to the side of Lin’s design.

📚Articles:

1. The Global AI Talent Tracker. This great analysis from macropolo.org shows how AI talents migrate among different countries. The United States has a large lead over all other countries in top-tier AI research, with nearly 60% of top-tier researchers working for American universities and companies. The result also clearly shows the US lead is built on attracting international talents as more than ⅔ of the top-tier AI researchers received undergraduates in other countries.
2. Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics. This impressive essay by Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein, two analysts of Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the economics of AI.
   • AI development often feels “closer to molecule discovery in pharma” than software engineering. This is because AI development is a process of experimenting and the job of an AI developer is to fit a statistical model to a dataset, test how well the model performs on new data, and repeat.
   • One of the complexities in the real-world data is that a lot of them have long-tail distribution. Intuitively, what this means is that that there are a lot of edge cases that appear infrequently yet important. This essay presents a guideline to tackle the issue and other similar ones.
   • Another interesting thought that I have after reading this essay is that the common metaphor of “data is oil” is not quite accurate. The energy of one barrel of oil is always the same regardless of the amount of oil you have used. In contrast, the benefits of extra data diminish as the size of data increases. The reason is that although training with more data helps the handling of new edge cases, the chance of seeing new cases decreases as you move further down to the tail. As a result, it is an art to find a balance of the predictive power and the complexity when we decide how much data we need.
3. AI job listings plummet as COVID-19 recession appears imminent. François Chollet, the creator of Keras and a researcher at Google Brain, posted a tweet that shows that AI jobs plummeted since the start of the COVID-19 recession. One of the reasons is for the correction of the hype in the past few years. However, this doesn’t mean that we should be bearish for the future of AI. Instead, COVID19 has been a catalyst for technology adoption for many industries (e.g., Zoom for video conferencing). I am optimistic that the pandemic would actually make more traditional companies start to embrace AI technologies.
   • 📌 We (Intellimize) are hiring for ML & AI scientists/engineers. Please shoot me an email if you are interested.
4. A lot of teams have moved to be fully remote during the pandemic. This blog lists a lot of virtual games that may be helpful to increase the bonding of the team and. In addition to those listed in the blog, I also highly recommend the drawphone game, I have tried it many times and enjoy it a lot.

🍭 Interesting Facts:

1. The Salton Sea is the largest lake within California and it is fascinating to see that it was created only in 1905 purely because of an engineering mistake. Unfortunately, it is dying because of the reduction of the input water recently. 
2. This is possibly how the Moai statues on Easter Island were moved in ancient times.