IKEA sets a new privacy standard for marketers
Tim Walters reports on an impressive approach by IKEA to earn consumer’s trust, by doing rather than (just) promising. As Tim says, you should really watch the IKEA video description and demo with their delightfully down-to-earth Chief Digital Officer, Barbara Martin Coppola. Read More
Transfer Learning with T5: the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer
Many of you are familiar with natural language processing (NLP) from the rule-based machine translation in the 80s to today’s more successful machine learning approaches. This post from the Google AI Blog describes a promising new Transfer Learning technique and openly available tools. Slightly technical with a link to the academic paper.
With T5, we propose reframing all NLP tasks into a unified text-to-text-format where the input and output are always text strings, in contrast to BERT-style models that can only output either a class label or a span of the input. Our text-to-text framework allows us to use the same model, loss function, and hyperparameters on any NLP task, including machine translation, document summarization, question answering, and classification tasks (e.g., sentiment analysis). Read More
The new business of AI (and how it’s different from traditional software)
Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein from Andreessen Horowitz wrote a thoughtful piece for AI startups and investors on the differences between the business models of AI companies and software companies. As investors they have a particular interest in the margin potential look at the resources and costs associated with each. My take is that is that they have identified a difference of degree rather than of kind, at least in the case of enterprise software applications, which have similar scaling, “humans in the loop”, interoperability, custom development, and support requirements. Large scale content management systems and “digital experience platforms” are examples. In any case, this is a good read, and all the authors’ recommendations should also be considered by traditional enterprise software companies :). Read More
Update on technology transformations
McKinsey reports on enterprise’s view and appetite for continued technology transformation. Tldr; it’s hard but showing benefits, and competitiveness demands its continuation. Read More
Also…
- You can probably guess some of this, but there’s lots of rich data… Where Wikipedia’s editors are, where they aren’t, and why via The Atlantic
- It’s complicated and expensive… The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world via MIT Technology Review
- You shouldn’t be surprised… Why Catalogs Are Making a Comeback via Harvard Business Review
- Would be nice to increase access to data while maintaining trust… Alternative data: exploring the ethical implications via Open Data Institute
The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. We do not sell or share personal data.
