
The Applied Machine Learning group at Facebook - mirandak4
https://backchannel.com/inside-facebooks-ai-machine-7a869b922ea7#.6462ygj0h
======
6stringmerc
Look, I get the investment in technology and desire to push the limits, but
sometimes these kinds of articles reveal a type of hubris that doesn't sit
well with me.

> _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.

~~~
orthoganol
>... metrics on how well the company has managed to reduce fake news

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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Was it already "censorship" when Facebook didn't present me, a card-carrying
socialist, with far-right websites in my feed? Or is it "censorship" when they
start taking USUncut out of my feed because, frankly, its journalistic quality
is crap?

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?

~~~
orthoganol
A small group of people doesn't get to say what is true, and then impose it on
everyone else, without being called arrogant, infantilizing of their own
users, or simply pushing politics (which is not farfetched given their execs
had such strong ties to one party last election). You should have the ability
to curate your own feed even if by managing your friends, but the buck stops
there.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
While I would never say the Facebook staff are intellectual authority figures,
I think that "a small group of people doesn't get to say what is true" is just
plain false. A small group of people tell the rest of us what's true all the
time. They're called domain experts.

>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_.

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NipunSingh
A lot of the people featured in this story came from Microsoft. Folks at
Microsoft/Facebook - any ideas as to why that is? Is it just that Microsoft is
a huge and dominant institution in computing so probability wise a lot of
people naturally would have backgrounds which came from Microsoft? Is it
because Microsoft is (or were??) leaders in ML/AI and it is has recently
become a FB focus area, so lots of hiring of Microsoft talent?

~~~
deepnotderp
MSR let go of one of their major AI/ML groups IIRC and they promptly joined
FAIR, plus Kaiming He and his group (one of the best) left for FAIR.

------
melling
They're moving some of the work to the client. Faster response and save on
servers?

“By running complex neural nets on the phone, you’re putting AI in the hands
of everybody,”

~~~
tomc1985
That's where we're going now then? My hardware is used to run your code for
your benefit, the scraps of which I can only hope to see should I be so
blessed by the gods at Facebook?

~~~
rdlecler1
It's not like they're running Seti@home on your phone. Presumably you're on
Facebook for your own value. The micro energy cost st the individual user will
be a rounding error but for Facebook and it's infrastructure it could be a
huge savings and should deliver better user experience. Seems smart to me.

~~~
trendia
> The micro energy cost at the individual level

The impact to people won't be the cost but rather the decreased battery life.

------
tomc1985
How topical -- it might even root out fake news!

To say nothing of all the other plans Facebook has for it...

~~~
metaobject
I used to really enjoy coming to HN for some good tech/hacker/software news
and to get away from the near ubiquitous political bullshit on th web, but
over the last few months this site has changed for the worse.

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.

