No doubt you can have big teams doing highly complicated work.
That doesn’t mean your AI system performs better than a simpler one. Or that the system is useful in the first place (recommendations.) I’m not saying they were sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I’m saying the vast majority of Twitter staff were not actually improving the Twitter product noticeably to users. They were doing highly complex, cutting-edge engineering that was make-work.
If Twitter tech was so advanced, why were they losing so much money?
The complexity of your product has nothing to do with whether it is profit making or not. If that was the case, you wouldn't have loss making products in the AI space nor would you have profit making products in the garden shovel space.
Advertising is a hard problem that not many companies have solved at the scale of Twitter, that is what I am trying to get at. There are not too many social media networks out there which have hundreds of millions of users and billions of data points, and it's very misleading to say that work done in such a scenario is "something fairly well-understood and at any rate done by a lot of teams in a lot of places", when literally they're the only ones with Twitter type data outside of a couple of other Chinese social networks.
> The complexity of your product has nothing to do with whether it is profit making or not.
Yes, this is my point. All this incredible AI engineering did not actually make Twitter a better product. They could have just as well not spent the money. The work was ultimately futile for Twitter, even though it might have advanced our understanding of AI and have incredibly practical applications elsewhere. Conventional measures worked fine.
That doesn’t mean your AI system performs better than a simpler one. Or that the system is useful in the first place (recommendations.) I’m not saying they were sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I’m saying the vast majority of Twitter staff were not actually improving the Twitter product noticeably to users. They were doing highly complex, cutting-edge engineering that was make-work.
If Twitter tech was so advanced, why were they losing so much money?