In 2006, Netflix held a groundbreaking competition offering a million dollars to improve their recommendation system by 10%. Back then, people received movies by mail and rated them online. The Netflix Prize attracted thousands of teams, with simple methods surprisingly excelling. “simonfunk” even hit 9th place with basic code worth over a million dollars. The event highlighted the power of machine learning competitions in driving innovation. However, controversy arose with privacy concerns and data correlation issues, leading Netflix to halt future competitions. This bitter lesson underscores the struggle between tech activism and big tech influence in today’s data-driven world.
https://www.argmin.net/p/prediction-games