Kaggle very obviously is useful for the research community, has led to quite a few people getting jobs they otherwise wouldn’t, and (as I can personally attest) is an excellent resource for learning.
It is also a way for companies to get work done. And maybe the competition format allows them to do so cheaper than people are comfortable with?
But one does not exclude the other. Indeed, it’s the premise for Kaggle’s, and really any marketplace’s, success that it found a model that is beneficial for all participants.
Competitions on Kaggle tend towards goals that are of universal value, of which the detection of deepfakes is one example. There are others that are rather far from any business case to support the idea that companies’ are looking to cheaply get something done, such as Google’s yearly Basketball score prediction competition (that comes with a relatively big pool of prizes).
In fact just the low number of competitions would seem to speak against the idea that cheapness is a primary motivator here. Because getting one challenge done for, say, half of what it might cost in-house just doesn’t register on the scale of these companies.
What I would assume to be the officially stated motivation, i. e. that it is a way to get a number of different approaches, possibly with ideas that wouldn’t come up within the far more homogeneous workforce of these companies, makes a lot more sense, intuitively.
It is also a way for companies to get work done. And maybe the competition format allows them to do so cheaper than people are comfortable with?
But one does not exclude the other. Indeed, it’s the premise for Kaggle’s, and really any marketplace’s, success that it found a model that is beneficial for all participants.
Competitions on Kaggle tend towards goals that are of universal value, of which the detection of deepfakes is one example. There are others that are rather far from any business case to support the idea that companies’ are looking to cheaply get something done, such as Google’s yearly Basketball score prediction competition (that comes with a relatively big pool of prizes).
In fact just the low number of competitions would seem to speak against the idea that cheapness is a primary motivator here. Because getting one challenge done for, say, half of what it might cost in-house just doesn’t register on the scale of these companies.
What I would assume to be the officially stated motivation, i. e. that it is a way to get a number of different approaches, possibly with ideas that wouldn’t come up within the far more homogeneous workforce of these companies, makes a lot more sense, intuitively.