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The death and life of prediction markets at Google
Over the past two decades, Google has hosted two different internal platforms for predictions. Why did the first one fail — and will the other endure?
It was Google’s opinion that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would be the most natural and friendly regulator, in part because the CFTC had already issued a " no action letter" protecting the Iowa Electronic Markets back in 1993. All three expressed reservations about trying again — as did my friends from other divisions, whom I would need to help me pitch Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator for full-time “20% projects,” to staff “Prophit 2.0.” And so I set the idea aside and instead found a role on the systems engineering team at the self-driving car company Waymo. All the examples of predictions in this article — executive hires, self-driving car safety metrics, COVID-19 workplace policies, datacenter costs, and LLM progress — could be useless or pivotal, depending on the process around it and the needs of the internal customer.
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