A radical solution to scale AI technology

Skip the proof of concept? This isn’t, or shouldn’t, be radical. It’s often a good idea for large scale projects, and not just for AI, or other digital experience or content technology initiatives.

How Medium became the best and worst place for coronavirus news

Medium’s pivots over the years created confusion about what they are and who they are for. The editorial challenges inherent in being both a platform and a publisher have only increased over time. Zoe Schiffer’s topical case study illustrates how difficult this balance is. Read More

It’s time to build

If you haven’t read this recent post by Marc Andreessen you should. Though prompted by frustration over our collective response to the current coronavirus pandemic, his prescription for preventing such future failures addresses a broader set of societal problems. Some he mentions; others are implicit, or follow, such as the focus on rent-seeking of wall street, VCs, and, well, too many of us. Read More

The New York Times’ morning email newsletter is getting an official “host and anchor”

Joshua Benton asks “Can any of the lessons of The Daily’s success be carried over into your inbox?” and attempts an answer, or rather asks the right questions. The new “The Morning” launched this week, and as someone who curates a newsletter I’ll be paying attention. But a podcast and an email newsletter are very different animals. Read More

Also…

• Should be important… Solution for IoT Interoperability – W3C Web of Things (WoT) via W3C

• Good… ICANN rejects transfer of control of .org to Ethos Capital. via ICANN

• Sexy Markdown… MDJS markup language adds JavaScript to Markdown for interactive documentation via InfoQ

• While we’re waiting for AR… Niantic buys 6D.AI as battle to own the AR cloud begins via Tech.Pinions

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. Subscribe | Feed | View online | Privacy policy | Editorial policy

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.

Dear Reader:

We have updated our privacy policy to include information about support for California’s CCPA and encourage you to read it. If you don’t have the time right now there is a link at the bottom of every issue of this newsletter and on every page on our web site. Note that we do not sell or share personal data.

Lessons from the failed chatbot revolution

“… and 5 industries where the tech is making a comeback.” This free report from CB Insights nails the story of the crazy hype and why some chatbots are succeeding. Read More

This page is designed to last

Jeff Huang, in his Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web, asks “How do we make web content that can last and be maintained for at least 10 years?”. It doesn’t sound like much of a challenge, but as someone with a 20+ year old website he didn’t need to convince me. Keeping up with varying life-cycles of web development tools, design trends, and links to sites no longer functioning, is not for everyone. And depending on platforms designed for non-developers is too risky for 10+ years. There is no simple solution but Professor Huang’s article has some suggestions for both tool developers and site managers. Read More

Open federal grant data is the default in the U.S.

Congress has quietly made an open, license-free identifier for the recipients of federal grants the default option for agencies in the United States. While truly open grant data is not mandatory, every agency must now decide whether to use non-proprietary identifiers or not. Read More

83% of marketers rip-and-replace a martech app each year

Scott Brinker highlights findings of a recent research report (link to full report included) on what martech applications are being replaced and why. While 83% will sound scary if you’re a vendor, remember how many martech apps there are. Also, about half the replacements were for custom in-house systems. (CMS vendors will be relieved to hear that only 4% of commercial CMSs were replaced, lower than most categories). Scott also notes that better integration was tied with better features and cost reduction as the top reason for replacement. Of course better integration directly affects operational costs and makes additional features possible. Read More

Also…

• Excellent resource… The AI Index 2019 Annual Report via Stanford University 
• Important to support this. ICANN’s founding chairman joins the battle to keep .org out of private hands Good for you @edyson! via The Verge
• India’s going big with data privacy… India’s About to Hand People Data Americans Can Only Dream Of via Bloomberg
• tl;dr federated learning. How Apple personalizes Siri without hoovering up your data via MIT Technology Review

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.