The Applied Machine Learning group at Facebook
backchannel.com
backchannel.com
>Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger, you may not realize it, but your experiences are being powered by AI.
It's not a "strong statement" as much as it is belligerently arrogant to the point of misguided. Facebook is its Users. No amount of AI can sell advertising the way Users can. And, last time I checked, it's still the User clicking around and having experiences.
AI is a servant and, for the foreseeable future, an extremely limited and immature one. Sure, in time it will help a lot of mundane things go more smoothly.
Like with this:
>For images and video, the AML team has built a machine learning vision platform called Lumos.
Great! Now Facebook can end the scourge of Freebooting and Copyright Infringement once and for all! I dearly look forward to the highly publicized ban-hammer drops! Because that's one of the main reasons those tools exist, right, to serve the actual creators and not the Facebook ecosystem at the end of the day? Oh. Right.
On a giant request, query, storage, and analysis engine that predates the AI trends. I'm sure Facebook uses plenty of machine learning algorithms but I wouldn't call it an AI company at this point. It's an advertising, media, and communication company that relies on user-generated content and ad networks. That's not as cool as an AI company, though. ;)
Or an arrogance in how they believe it's fine (if not their duty) to censor news stories, as they deem fit, almost as if people of voting age can't think for themselves.
Which one of these was censorship? Does Fox News have a right to show up in my feed, given that I very much don't want to see it?
The pope didn't endorse Donald Trump. That is objective fact. Yet that popped up on facebook.
Why shouldn't they censor that shit?
>You should have the ability to curate your own feed even if by managing your friends, but the buck stops there.
The feed is generated by an algorithm designed to maximize the chance I click links from my feed. It has never been a rote concatenation of my Facebook friends' walls/timelines/whatever-they're-called-today.
That kind of concatenation and interleaving of content from my friends would be an improvement. It's just not what we ever had at any point. Facebook has not suddenly acquired a bias or agenda. It's been filter-bubbling everyone since forever, and now people have objected that some of what it feeds them in their own personal bubble is bullshit.
I think you might be over reacting to this language, I believe the intent of the original article was to say that "the current Facebook USER EXPERIENCE cannot exist without AI" - clearly there are other things (users, user engagement) that make up integral parts of Facebook. No one is saying the product is AI.
I want a chronologically ordered list of the things my friends post. That's it. I get that ads are a necessary evil, but I don't like some AI picking and choosing what posts I get to see and what I don't. I don't trust facebook anymore, and I want to move off it - I just can't because that's where everybody is.
“By running complex neural nets on the phone, you’re putting AI in the hands of everybody,”
The impact to people won't be the cost but rather the decreased battery life.
What you get back is more relevant ads err content err you stay longer attached to the ad screen err to your phone.
They seem to think we find this valuable.
Honestly outdoing that level of unnecessary client pushing nonsense is really an achievement.
To say nothing of all the other plans Facebook has for it...
I've had different accounts over the years since the beginning of HN, following pg, rtm, arc, etc. and I've never seen it like this. Differing opinions are what make discussions interesting, but this whole "fake news" horseshit Trump is pushing is just pure garbage.