I get the impression you aren’t a software engineer. So to clarify: AI is not generalized enough to the point where there’d be much common expertise unless, say, this code review was very narrowly focused on computer vision. And even then this article specifically talks about code review, which, unless you have the context of the Twitter codebase isn’t going to be very meaningful. You might do this if you’re buying a teeny tiny startup with no real engineering culture - not (formerly) publicly traded company.
I’be been a software engineer for nearly 2 decades and have been involved in multiple technical due-diligence endeavors. At best, you’re just grokking the big-picture and looking for any major red flags. Getting involved in individual code reviews is not a useful exercise outside of understanding a team’s SDLC and various coding practices - for an org the size of Twitter all of that stuff should have been documented and shared during due diligence (which Musk waved) - injecting outside engineers into the code review process is just an expensive and sloppy way to uncover what could otherwise be gleaned in an easier fashion.
I do see one big red flag for Twitter: it now has leadership that doesn’t trust the engineering organization. For a technology company that can be fatal if not resolved quickly.
Both the vision systems at Tesla and the bot-detection at Twitter are classifiers. Both would have trained on large datasets. Both would have domain specific feature detection sitting below a more general algorithm. Both would have a similar basis for evaluation. Both have real-time constraints on the classification problem. An engineer (who is probably an ML specialist) familiar with one would not be starting from scratch in understanding and evaluating the other system.
> Counter-point: Tesla is rumored to be working on a phone.
How is this a counter point? How exactly doing superficial review of code they've never seen of a social network will help them with developing a phone?
Who has a better notification / messaging system at scale, that isn’t already a phone maker? I suspect the Tesla phone team would be thrilled to review that code.
> Who has a better notification / messaging system at scale
1. Apple. Facebook. TikTok. It's a somewhat simple problem that at scale is often solved by simply spinning a PubSub channel per user because you no longer care.
2. To review that code you don't just grab people to spend an afternoon doing superficial reviews of code they've never seen.
I’be been a software engineer for nearly 2 decades and have been involved in multiple technical due-diligence endeavors. At best, you’re just grokking the big-picture and looking for any major red flags. Getting involved in individual code reviews is not a useful exercise outside of understanding a team’s SDLC and various coding practices - for an org the size of Twitter all of that stuff should have been documented and shared during due diligence (which Musk waved) - injecting outside engineers into the code review process is just an expensive and sloppy way to uncover what could otherwise be gleaned in an easier fashion.
I do see one big red flag for Twitter: it now has leadership that doesn’t trust the engineering organization. For a technology company that can be fatal if not resolved quickly.