Today’s theme, for no particular reason, is Data Professionals Behaving Badly. First we have news that 48% of IT organizations regularly release applications they know contain security flaws. See this blog post for a full-scale rant on the topic, quoting a half-dozen different surveys.
A cynic would argue that Facebook has limited some groups fostering QAnon conspiracy theories because QAnon’s extreme craziness alienates slightly-less-crazy voters inclined to support Republicans. A true cynic would say they did it to give the rightists something to rally against, while noting Facebook’s actions are far from a complete ban. Either way, before you cheer Facebook’s sudden lurch towards responsibility, remember they have fostered hate groups for years and bent their rules to favor rightist misinformation.
Back on more familiar turf, Informatica has purchased GreenBay Technologies, which offers AI-based entity matching, schema matching, and metadata graphs. The tech will strengthen Informatica’s capabilities for “self-integrating systems”. Who needs citizen integrators when robots can do the job instead?
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.