
Facebook Messenger Assistant Powered by Humans - chris-at
http://recode.net/2015/11/03/facebooks-virtual-assistant-m-is-super-smart-its-also-probably-a-human/
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pgodzin
> “The reason this is exciting is it’s scalable,” he added. “We cannot afford
> to hire operators for the entire world to be their personal assistant.”

Why all the praise when the goal will look nothing like it looks now. They
don't actually know that it's scalable, otherwise we'd be seeing a completely
non-human dependent AI with limited functionality (like ordering food) first.
The current approach is just getting more data to see if the real version can
work at scale.

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visakanv
> Why all the praise when the goal will look nothing like it looks now

Because the media machine needs to keep spinning. Rather than give a balanced
statement now, which takes more effort to put together, it's easier to post
"Wow, this is amazing" now and then "Wow, that was disappointing" later, and
then get double the hits.

Relevant: [https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-
a-n...](https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-
on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e)

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discardorama
Reminds me of Google's 411 service back in the day. People thought "cool,
Google is offering a free service". But Google was just collecting voice
samples to train its voice recognition algorithms.

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x5n1
ok Google. Spy on all my activities. Sell them to corporations and
governments.

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jsprogrammer
>If a user asks A, you respond B.

A user may never ask A. Or, a user may only ask A once; in which case, did we
really need to pre-compute the answer?

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dump100
with 100s millions of user, each question will become a common question.

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jsprogrammer
Questions like: what, why, when, how? They are very common, but don't have
definite answers.

The problem is, even with 100s of millions (or even billions), there are still
an infinite number of questions that can be asked. _Each_ of those questions
can't be common.

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dennisnedry
We are still far away from having computer's truly be able to learn on their
own, without having a human optimizing the responses.

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visakanv
> We are still far away from having computer's truly be able to learn on their
> own, without having a human optimizing the responses.

Could say the same about humans, though. We can't truly learn on our own
without having others calibrating the process, or otherwise things set up by
others.

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nikolay
"Supervised learning" makes me even more excited about M, because pure AI at
this point won't be so useful.

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ganwar
AI in large part is supervised learning. I think the more important question
here is when that becomes feasible for general purpose stuff for facebook.

