Yes, it's hard to know in the balance whether the net contribution of these advertising companies (fb and google mainly) is a net positive, but their contribution to ML research is unmatched and has created an insane amount of value (I'd speculate rivaling their market caps but someone can probably prove me wrong) in business and research that uses the tools they've built.
The net impact of these companies is massively positive. Facebook, with its trust-engendering social graph, enables huge numbers of businesses and social groups to exist that otherwise couldn't while Google has enabled so much information discovery that we just take for granted now.
Of course I would argue there's a better way to provide these kinds of services that concentrates power less, and that's decentralization with cryptoeconomic incentives to maintain consensus, but for their generation, they did well.
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For all the hate that Facebook gets their only redeeming quality is these open source projects they have been releasing all along.
Maybe this is to attract better engineers but all in all this has been a net postive for software development. So credit where it is due.
Yes, it's hard to know in the balance whether the net contribution of these advertising companies (fb and google mainly) is a net positive, but their contribution to ML research is unmatched and has created an insane amount of value (I'd speculate rivaling their market caps but someone can probably prove me wrong) in business and research that uses the tools they've built.
The net impact of these companies is massively positive. Facebook, with its trust-engendering social graph, enables huge numbers of businesses and social groups to exist that otherwise couldn't while Google has enabled so much information discovery that we just take for granted now.
Of course I would argue there's a better way to provide these kinds of services that concentrates power less, and that's decentralization with cryptoeconomic incentives to maintain consensus, but for their generation, they did well.