> they have near infinite money and others have not

Given the very high margins on inference, once volume is large enough the other can also start printing enough money.

I did so and roughly twenty years later, my 4th attempt is "finished" in a sense and playing on lichess bots from time to time.

The process is very rewarding and there are great resources (chessprogramming wiki). To get an initial bot play random moves is not that much work but it is a good starting point because you can hook it into a gui and watch.

From there you do the move generator and the search and then optimization possibilities are endless :)

To me, the most interesting part is the architecture of the engine. How you encode a position or a move, how you design the move generator, etc.

Something as simple as encoding the 64-square board in a 64-bit number leads to a rabbit hole that can last years.

After that point, the "AI" part is already solved and you just need to implement it (alpha-beta + all the heuristics).

Most of the recent chess engines simply implement a neural network (by copying Stockfish) and suddenly are at 3000 elo with no effort! Such a waste.

I really like ChessX ( https://chessx.sourceforge.io/ ). Pychess was always unstable and slow for me.

Anyways. Now I can use an even better Stockfish to benchmark my own engine..

You have to trust that this really "deidentifies". Time and time again it was shown, that the measures taken were not enough to anonymize.

E.g. the parent wrote that he fears, he could be identified by his writing style, which is totally plausible. How would you "deidentify" this?

Even if they follow to the letter a deidentification process, Google and Meta have so much data about individuals that re-identification shouldn't be very hard for the majority of airline passengers' data they put their hands on.

Of course, takes a lot more effort than not doing proper deindetification in the first place but if they wanted to appear like caring about data privacy they still have enough data points to correlate the sets later on (and/or over time).

The idea that there’s a nefarious plot to do something super evil with this data is a bit crackpot though based on their incentives.

Remember, Google = Ads. Their only focus and only care. Their mission statement, rendered accurately, is “Ads ads ads ads. Effective ads. Ads worth paying a lot for. Ads ads ads. Advertising and ads.”

If they choose to be evil in some additional way, (1) remember, they would only do that if in some way it serves their advertising needs — not to offer innovative new black-hat databroker services to airlines, and (2) this little dataset will not need to be re-identified. They’ll just use the 20 years of email and search data they already have on like half the world’s population.

No need for a nefarious plot, as usual with capitalism it just needs incentives. They will have the data, if at some point it's beneficial to Google to re-identify it then it will be done.

Do I believe they have incentives to do it now? No, as you point it out for their advertisement cash-cow they can already just rely on their own data (GMail, Search, Google Flights) but nothing stops them from the potential later on, the data is now theirs.

Likely its value is just to train LLMs but the funny thing about data is that you can always try to find ways to extract more value out of it. I'd prefer there was no possibility for that without requiring me to trust Google (or any corporation).

In an ideal world my data would be mine to control, not to be traded in deals among 3rd parties, it's valuable and I've spent time generating it so in a sense I've done free work to be extracted by these corpos.

That kind of is a reason.