Not sure if it was intentional, but saying "uses AI" in the headline makes it sound like this is a modern thing, but the techniques here are closer to the linear regression side of AI than the trasnformer side. The headline could have been "DraftKings Targets Problem Gamblers." It would have put the outrage where it should be.
Most places at this scale have code freezes in place well before conferences. The most likely issues are some launch couldn't handle the scale or periodic deployments have been saving them from some sort of long-standing leak bug, and pausing going into Dreamforce meant some service hasn't been restarted in a week. Historically, Salesforce sharded by customer, so that goes against both of these, unless it's in a routing layer.
I'm an ex-Salesforce, and yes, at the time I left, there was a huge change freeze surrounding Dreamforce. Unless a demo of an announced feature was coming in really at the buzzer, change velocity would have been low since a few weeks ago. I worked in a sub-cloud, so I can't even speculate as to the reason for the failure.
Something I wonder about is whether SRE responses were delayed due to having to be emergency-change-approved because Dreamforce was on. I don't recall a global outage ever occurring during a change freeze when I worked there, so /shrug.
When I interviewed at Facebook in 2019, one interviewer was on an integrity team. I'm not sure if it was his take or what the org settled on, but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem. Not surprising some of the same techniques got used by others.
I'm pretty sure that is a mis-characterization of what actually happened: a 3rd party app collected user profile data from FB _through somebody's friend connection_ [1].
The Zuck then apologized for this undocumented API access leak and FB subsequently patched it out of their platform. It had nothing to do with running ads. We shouldn't let time paper over the details here.
I know someone at FB who worked on a project whose entire goal was to use compiler/type checker technology to prevent intentional and unintentional leaking of personal data in FB back-end code. If you can believe that. The project had a fair amount of resources and high-level support.
I don't know if it was a psy-op or deception campaign or what.
I think you're thinking of something else, but they also added "capabilities" to Hack (their main frontend language; it's a PHP fork) to make leaking data between requests or in logs painful.
> But when reflecting on the biggest mistakes of his career, Zuckerberg said his largest one was a “political miscalculation” that he described as a “20-year mistake.” Specifically, he said, he’d taken too much ownership for problems allegedly out of Facebook’s control. “Some of the things they were asserting that we were doing or were responsible for, I don’t actually think we were,” said Zuckerberg. “When it’s a political problem… there are people operating in good faith who are identifying a problem and want something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame.”
TechCrunch then goes on to blame Zuckerberg by insinuation. As someone who dislikes Facebook and Zuckerberg, I think Big Tech is a rather convenient boogeyman for fallout from the 2016 election & beyond.
There's also the fact that all parties involved benefits from overstating the story. Facebook doesn't hate the reputation that their impact is so powerful as to sway elections. Cambridge Analytica and whatever they turned into has a reference customer like any other. Those who lost the election has an explanation that doesn't involve having to change.
Zuckerberg sounds a bit entitled in that interview. Yes, it was a chore having to appear in the senate and all, but he would probably not hesitate to take that same chance again if he could. As they say, all attention is good attention, and that probably goes double if you personally control the biggest social network on the planet.
> but it's that Cambridge Analytica wasn't Facebook's fault (users willingly granted access), but it was their problem.
In Careless People, they mentioned that this was a strategy they wanted to employ:
They wanted facebook to become a tool for winning elections so that they would have more leverage over the politicians in power.
For example, they were trying to fight the Indian government over internet.org initiative (essentially shipping out a stripped down version of the internet to impoverished areas where they could only use facebook and a couple other apps, subsidized by telecoms). They used facebook features to incite backlash against the Indian government.
to me it feels like the entire email exchange is scripted. Would Zuck really ask a question that would end up in a lawsuit over __email__ of all mediums?
Man, if I'd interviewed with FB and even heard the word "integrity" I'd have started laughing my ass off till I was covered in a puddle of my own piss. Not a single person at facebook has integrity, it's been that way since day one.
> you will face criminal and financial penalties for damages caused
Even with where we're at right now, if people involved with the HF or Ruby Gems attacks faced legal consequences, the industry would get a lot more conservative very quickly. And unlike social media, section 230 doesn't apply, and there aren't any free speech concerns.
The HF and Ruby Gems attacks came from safety testing, where the AI providers attempted to understand what negative consequences could arise if someone subverted their safety protections. Don't you worry that legal consequences would disfavor safety testing and thus create more rather than fewer problems?
Those attacks happened due to sheer incompetence and negligence, starting from a woefully insufficient "sandbox" and OAI employees ignoring every issue that popped up along the way.
If there were actual consequences perhaps they would've not been so laissez-faire with their testing and would've done it in a properly controlled environment rather than the absolute joke of a system they set up.
Pure speculation: could the acquisition be related? Given that NVIDIA has ownership in OpenAI and really, really, really doesn’t want the AI bubble to deflate
We're going to see more of this as the web 2.0 and mobile development booms fade, and I don't have a good solution. What do you do when you're a mature SaaS with a solid customer base, stalled growth, headcount for hypergrowth, and investors looking to move on.
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