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Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

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Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#81

Post by BergAndCo »

stavros wrote: post #57
chambers wrote: post #20

Hats off to Statsig. They built a stellar product. Superior to many of their industry competitors like Optimizely. Back when I was on an internal Experimentation platform, we were impressed how they balanced dev velocity & stat rigor https://www.statsig.com/updates These guys ship. Business-wise, I think getting acquired was the right choice. Experimentation is too small & treacherous to build a great business, and t…

It gives Statsig a lot more room to explore how our cursor movements and keystrokes can train LLMs to emulate humans browsing the web, you mean?

[dead]

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#82

Post by beeon »

iamleppert wrote: post #80

The problem with A/B testing, and anyone who has ever done it at scale can tell you, beyond the banal basic stuff that people are already aware of like making things accessible and discoverable, once you get to a certain point, people just have no opinion. The default opinion is no opinion. It's why every mass consumer product devolves into a feed or a list of content delivered by an algorithm. Once you reach a certa…

Maybe the industry you work in is relevant here. In e-commerce, A/B testing the position and color of "add to cart" button can yield legitimate revenue multipliers. People's opinions are irrelevant in that kind of A/B test, all that matters is the likelihood they continue down the funnel.

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#83

Post by iamleppert »

beeon wrote: post #82
iamleppert wrote: post #80

The problem with A/B testing, and anyone who has ever done it at scale can tell you, beyond the banal basic stuff that people are already aware of like making things accessible and discoverable, once you get to a certain point, people just have no opinion. The default opinion is no opinion. It's why every mass consumer product devolves into a feed or a list of content delivered by an algorithm. Once you reach a certa…

Maybe the industry you work in is relevant here. In e-commerce, A/B testing the position and color of "add to cart" button can yield legitimate revenue multipliers. People's opinions are irrelevant in that kind of A/B test, all that matters is the likelihood they continue down the funnel.

This is always the straw man A/B testing people reach for. When in reality, this only works on the worst possible designs or bizarre layouts, that no one really uses. It's a myth that you can somehow ring out extra few % by making tiny changes to fonts and colors -- in every case, they simply stop the experiment when the results tip in their favor.

The ONLY time I've ever seen it used successfully was to make changes to the layout of ads, making them look like more organic content or likely to be accidentally clicked. You can see this at work if you've ever clicked on an ad by mistake, or maybe you were trying to close the ad and noticed someone has "optimized" the close button placement using one of these A/B tools.

There it is, that's the market for these tools. That represents the vast majority of the these companies use-cases, revenue and usage. Anyone else who implies an innocent intent is either ignorant or inexperienced.

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#84

Post by utyop22 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #77
jitl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you monetize cutting edge ai tech? Sell it. Who has money? Businesses.

If you can produce cutting edge AI tech, the opportunity cost is just too high to spend $1B on already established companies. Such acquisitions basically say that OpenAI can’t find a project worthy of $1B of compute and exceptional AI researchers either because there is nothing innovative they believe they can come up with or because anything innovative will be commoditized and produce little returns.

Correct.

So whats your prediction for the next 12 months?

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#85

Post by tibbar »

iamleppert wrote: post #83
beeon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the industry you work in is relevant here. In e-commerce, A/B testing the position and color of "add to cart" button can yield legitimate revenue multipliers. People's opinions are irrelevant in that kind of A/B test, all that matters is the likelihood they continue down the funnel.

This is always the straw man A/B testing people reach for. When in reality, this only works on the worst possible designs or bizarre layouts, that no one really uses. It's a myth that you can somehow ring out extra few % by making tiny changes to fonts and colors -- in every case, they simply stop the experiment when the results tip in their favor. The ONLY time I've ever seen it used successfully was to make changes…

Experimentation is a toolkit for optimizing things. That's it. For example, if you are Uber, you might offer a bonus to people to work more. How much money do you offer? Is there a relationship between how much you pay and how well people perform? To determine this, you need empirical data, you need to be able to split people into groups, and you need to be able to measure things about the groups. And you need some guardrails to keep yourself from p-hacking. As the number of people and the amount of money increases, the number of interesting questions rises rapidly. These are all things you get from an experimentation platform.

Experimentation works best when a) it's easy to try different parameters for a thing, and b) there is a lot of money involved.

Your comment is weird to me because you seem to be implying that experimentation is a cult because there are no things worth optimizing, and/or optimizing things has a negative societal effect. Those things are obviously true some of the time, but it's not very interesting.

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#87

Post by LudwigNagasena »

utyop22 wrote: post #84
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can produce cutting edge AI tech, the opportunity cost is just too high to spend $1B on already established companies. Such acquisitions basically say that OpenAI can’t find a project worthy of $1B of compute and exceptional AI researchers either because there is nothing innovative they believe they can come up with or because anything innovative will be commoditized and produce little returns.

Correct. So whats your prediction for the next 12 months?

I dunno. It will just become another diversified Big Tech company?

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#88

Post by utyop22 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #87
utyop22 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. So whats your prediction for the next 12 months?

I dunno. It will just become another diversified Big Tech company?

Can you call Meta diversified given most of its forward looking revenue comes from IG? Lol.

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#89

Post by LudwigNagasena »

utyop22 wrote: post #88
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. It will just become another diversified Big Tech company?

Can you call Meta diversified given most of its forward looking revenue comes from IG? Lol.

They sell ads. For people to look at ads they need to grab their attention. So they have an ad network, a social media platform, a microblogging platform, a short-form media sharing platform, a messenger, VR SW, VR HW, smart glasses, LLMs, a marketplace, a dating service, a street imagery service, a fitness service, some B2B stuff and so on.

Re: Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig

#90

Post by utyop22 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #89
utyop22 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you call Meta diversified given most of its forward looking revenue comes from IG? Lol.

They sell ads. For people to look at ads they need to grab their attention. So they have an ad network, a social media platform, a microblogging platform, a short-form media sharing platform, a messenger, VR SW, VR HW, smart glasses, LLMs, a marketplace, a dating service, a street imagery service, a fitness service, some B2B stuff and so on.

"Can you call Meta diversified given most of its forward looking revenue comes from IG? Lol."

Meta's long term value, as it stands, seemingly comes predominantly from IG given that the probability of success of those things you mentioned are very low and FB is on its last legs in the developed world.

Meta is highly concentrated on IG. And how do we know this? Well Meta's revenues were beat recently by Bytedance. What is Bytedances premier App?

Tiktok.

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