It’s like me running a web crawler on my phone and saying I can replace Google.
The hard part is in being able to translate a search query into a list of pages.
And that requires a level of sophistication that far exceeds a laptop.
I sometimes wonder how much value ML provides vs a proper sort function for anything but advertising.
Do you think that the most successful web companies in the world with arguably the best people i.e. Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Netflix, Snapchat etc. have no idea what they are doing. That the highly complex, expensive and latency impacting recommendation systems could be replaced by trivial sorting.
Or maybe they do work, do translate to increased usage and do significantly impact revenue.
Would it be better to live in a world where Twitter (for example) existed because it is a useful thing and not because it might make lots of money?
It's not just ads, it means the set of people you follow becomes extremely critical for your experience in a way that makes it far less engaging.
That may be good or bad for you as a user depending on what you want, but for Twitter having most people stick to the ML augmented timeline is essential to keep you hooked.
