
Facebook's AI lab - vkhuc
https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151728212367143
======
swalsh
The AI facebook has today is already freaky to me at times... while I love any
new advancement in AI, these advancements will probably not be used in my
interests.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
Value of Facebook consists of two things, you and your data. It is not good
for long term strategy of Facebook to hurt either.

Here are some things where smart AI could help: 1\. Better filtering of spam
bots. 2\. Better filtering of ads that would significantly improve ad quality.
3\. Smart assistant that learns your habits and makes smart suggestions such
as: which events to attend, your writing style, and filters immediate
notifications based on personalized importance score.

Or Facebook could exploit machine learning/AI techniques to simply drive up
click through ratio on their ads.

~~~
stokedmartin
>3\. Smart assistant that learns your habits and makes smart suggestions such
as: ...

Recognize your romantic partner using FB network[0]

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759866)

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yangtheman
Am I the only one who is skeptical about this announcement? I am sure the
amount of data Facebook has will be huge asset to any sort of AI development,
but precisely because of the amount of data and the kinds of data they have,
it's just scary what this could be used for...

AI that has personal information of 500M+ people, using it to manipulate
people...(first to click on advertisements, and then much more). In the hands
of government, I shudder to think what's possible. With NSA already snooping
around, perhaps it's not all that distant.

~~~
justaman
The announcement of an organization who's revenue is based on advertising
doing research into AI deeply scares me. Take a look at this MIT study _. Each
day our corporation based government takes a step closer to 1984 and each day
people become more and more apathetic and quick to change the subject at the
first sign of the conversation.

_[http://web.mit.edu/people/amliu/Papers/PentlandLiu_NeuralCom...](http://web.mit.edu/people/amliu/Papers/PentlandLiu_NeuralComp99_v11n2.pdf)

~~~
tehf0x
Umm what do you think google's revenue is based on?

~~~
justaman
Google's mission is "Dont be evil". They have since crossed this line, and
will again. I do not trust google either.

~~~
Karunamon
If you consider selling ads and complying with the appropriate authorities
when compelled to "evil", that is.

------
demonicus
"We were foolish to think Google was the entity that would become Skynet, when
it was Facebook all along." \- John Connor

~~~
larrybolt
AI always inspired me to become better at programming and learn new languages,
methods and idea's. And even with the currently available tools and
technologies, it amazes me how little of these dreams I had actually exist or
are being worked on.

EDIT: Just came across an article: "The Mother of All Demos" is 45 today;
Douglas Engelbart did exactly what I'm hoping someone today will be able to
pull of.

~~~
xerophtye
Link to the article?

~~~
larrybolt
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879)

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turing
Wow. With Hinton at Google and LeCun at Facebook, industry has definitely been
pulling some big names away from academia.

~~~
yeukhon
I beg to differ. They still publish papers and big names in academia are often
consultants or receiving grants from private industry. And according to LeCun
he will remain as professor at NYU and run his research lab from NYU. He will
serve as director and lead researcher.

~~~
fat0wl
Oh man that guy was my machine learning professor at NYU :) Sparked my
interested in Lisp, but now I seem to recall that he wrote all the problem
examples in his own language.... Lush. Even so, all my knowledge of Lisp
syntax and neural nets stems from his bad-ass lectures

~~~
mathattack
Forcing folks to learn his own language is a pretty big conceit. You think
he'll be able to get away with that at Fbook?

~~~
fat0wl
yeh it was rough at the time but looking back, if i'd known lisp at all
beforehand it wouldnt have been so bad. it was directly listed by many as a
turn-off though and is a big part of why a lot of people from my dep't just
audited

~~~
mathattack
ahh - got it. My dept was very heavy on Scheme. Reasonable to have a LISP-
variant for AI.

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TrainedMonkey
This is huge. LeCun is one of the leading AI experts in the world. With
resources of Facebook I expect great things. I also see this as a technology
bet by Facebook on long term strategy _.

_ I own Facebook stock, so I might be biased.

~~~
oatmealsnap
Will "great things" be "better ads"? Or maybe something worth while...

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superfx
Rob Fergus is joining Facebook too:

[https://plus.google.com/103199870243230279182/posts/JaqgU1sX...](https://plus.google.com/103199870243230279182/posts/JaqgU1sXkdN)

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lucb1e
I'm not sure what I should think of this. What are your thoughts with regard
to the amount of personal information that Facebook possesses? Regardless of
whether they are good or evil, what do you think the potential implications
are? I'm curious about HN's thoughts.

~~~
anoncowherd
>> What are your thoughts with regard to the amount of personal information
that Facebook possesses?

 _" Fucking disgusting"_

>> Regardless of whether they are good or evil, what do you think the
potential implications are?

Less privacy, more data in the hands of governments, more police state.

~~~
res0nat0r
The FB data is being given to them freely by their users

~~~
lucb1e
Define: freely

I think Moxie Marlinespike's talk at Defcon 18 (2010) was a really good one:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk)

He talks about how we do not really have a free choice when it comes to things
like having a Facebook account or having a mobile phone. Namely due to the
network effect, you don't really have a choice if you want to be a normal
member of society.

~~~
res0nat0r
How is any of that Facebooks fault?

~~~
ars_technician
That's exactly their goal. Get as many people to use it as possible so it will
be painful to not use. Then exploit the information they gain as much as
possible because the users have no alternative.

~~~
res0nat0r
No alternative? No one is being forced to use Facebook.

~~~
sushirain
There is an increasing amount of peer pressure though.

~~~
argonaut
"How is any of that Facebooks fault?"

As repeated by resonator several posts up.

~~~
ars_technician
What don't you get? It's exactly facebook's goal to get critical mass to get
the network peer pressure.

If it's my goal to create a product that forces people via social pressure to
do something, it's definitely my fault when it works.

Your response is the same as people saying "don't fly" when they complain
about the TSA. 'Someone had an unpleasant experience with the TSA? How is that
the TSA's fault? That person didn't have to fly.'

~~~
argonaut
NO. It depends. Let's reduce your argument to the absurd. If I make it a goal
of mine that <foo> happens by next week, and I do <bar> in the meantime, and
in fact <foo> happens, whether or not <foo> is my fault depends on what <bar>
I did. If <bar> = nothing, then obviously <foo> was not my fault.

Facebook has designed a killer product that makes it really easy to use for
social interaction. But Facebook is not forcing you to use it, Facebook is not
forcing your friends to use it, Facebook is not forcing social peer _pressure_
on you, and if in fact someone's friends are wholesale excluding that person
because they're not on Facebook, Facebook is not responsible for the fact that
someone has shitty friends that are too lazy to include that person.

------
aioprisan
I took LeCun's class in undergrad at NYU and it definitely wasn't easy. He's a
fantastic speaker, definitely made it more enjoyable.

~~~
krebby
Same here. His Machine Learning course was one of the hardest but most
rewarding classes I've ever taken. Definitely glad to see him expanding his
reach outside of Academia.

------
loceng
This is all about finding patterns for businesses to better target and sell to
people. Valuable information is likely NOT going to reach or become usable by
say government organizations or other organizations that are trying to problem
solve big problems - at least not be affordable, because they'll be competing
with for-profit businesses for bidding on access those users.

------
mturmon
Star power at NIPS:

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CTO Michael Schroepfer and I are at the Neural
Information Processing Systems Conference in Lake Tahoe today. Mark will
announce the news during his presentation at the NIPS Workshop on Deep
Learning later today."

It seems Zuckerberg will have an apres-ski Q&A, and be in a panel discussion
at day's end
([https://sites.google.com/site/deeplearningworkshopnips2013/s...](https://sites.google.com/site/deeplearningworkshopnips2013/schedule)).
Hope the room is big enough.

~~~
btown
At NIPS now. There have been rumors going around that Zuckerberg might have
just been interested in attending, giving a casual Q&A, not announcing
anything like this - but with this announcement, I foresee them having to take
down all of the dividers in Harveys ;)

~~~
jekdoce
Could you post some bullet points of what was said there? Would be really
appreciated by everyone I'm sure!

~~~
btown
Unfortunately I didn't make it to his talks - was in other workshops where it
would have been impolite to leave. Did get to see him as he was walking off
stage though! More relevantly, though, many of my collaborators did attend the
deep learning workshop, so I'll grill them about the details over dinner and
post about it!

~~~
jekdoce
Thanks! Would be interesting to hear what areas FB is trying to apply deep
learning to? One obvious area is recognition of objects and people in photos,
but I wonder if they plan to use it on other type of data like say text for
sentiment analysis or for recommendation engines of various kind?

------
bborud
In the eyes of Facebook, we are all undressed. Now it will be like they are
throwing in a free colonoscopy while they're at it.

I bet the guys over at Fort Meade are beside themselves with happiness over
this :-)

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zerooneinfinity
Seeing Peter Norvig congratulate him in the status gave me chills. Great times
to be living around these titans indeed.

------
DanBC
When Google announces AI research it makes sense because self driving cars and
trying to understand what a user means by typing stuff in a search box.

But Facebook? They could create a million virtual DanBCs and then A/B test
something against them, and then present me with the irresistible ad,
perfectly pitched to draw me in?

~~~
nacs
And what makes you think Google can't or won't do the same? Their latest
aggressive push of Google+ everywhere including the forced Youtube integration
indicates that they have the capability or have been doing exactly what you
suggest.

Not to mention the huge amounts of data they collect through searches and
Gmail that they already have been using to tailor ads to each visitor.

~~~
DanBC
Oh, I totally agree.

I see Google announcing AI research, and I think "self driving car" or
"understanding search terms", but I have no doubt that it's also "serve better
ads" or "slurp more data".

You're right, I should have put that in.

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dhammack
Can you imagine the datasets FB has to work with? Statuses, pictures,
locations, social graphs. It's incredible. It's hard to blame LeCun/Hinton/Ng
for moving towards industry with data like that. I'd bet that the only place
with more data than FB/Google is our good friends at the NSA.

~~~
msoad
My friend used to work at NSA research. He said they don't have much ready to
use data yet

~~~
btown
Apparently, it's because NSA researchers are spending all their time playing
WoW instead.

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jnardiello
This is awesome and incredibly creepy at the same time.

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wcoenen
The combination of AI and social networks reminds me of Friendship is
Optimal[1].

It's a story about an AI who has the job "to satisfy everybody's values
through friendship and ponies" in an MMORPG but breaks out and starts
_optimizing_ the real world.

[1]
[http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/)

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ezioamf
Google has won the search indexing game. Who will win the next level when
robots understands the content?

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sureshv
I hope these labs are as productive as Google or the old DEC labs:
[http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-
DEC/](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/)

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X4
Is any of the conference videos available online, or is that only for paying
customers?

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ayubskhan
Cool! Will soon see online/offline AI in action!

------
achompas
_random thoughts on this announcement_

I took Yann's ML class during the first semester of my program at NYU two
years ago. It was a terrible experience, given that I hadn't worked with
linear algebra or mathematical statistics since about 2008. I could barely
write Python at the time, so my Lush code was some ungodly non-functional
crap. That said, I'm very happy I took the class in 2011 despite
hyperventilating my way through the final--it was only offered once more, and
I suspect it will never be offered again given today's news.

Yann really knows his stuff. His convolutional nets (and their application to
MNIST and image segment classification) represented a significant improvement
in computer vision, and he demoed some incredible low-latency image
segmentation stuff for us. He runs one of the best neural net labs in the
world (up there with Hinton's and Bengio's), and he has some incredible
students at NYU. I can see this shaping up as a delayed acquihire of
sorts...he will not struggle to find excellent candidates.

There's a lot of discussion around the privacy implications, but I think
everyone's rehashing old points. Facebook already hires excellent researchers
and data scientists -- John Myles White and Sean Taylor just moved out west --
but they don't focus on images just yet, from what I know. This hiring
represents an investment in image analysis on Facebook's behalf that matches
what they put into unstructured textual data and graphical inference. If
you've already stayed with Facebook through the "graph search" announcement,
this shouldn't surprise you either.

As someone interested in this type of work, it's an exciting time to live in
New York City. Finance and adtech have been here forever, but things have
expanded. Many startups (Foursquare, Tumblr, Knewton, Etsy) have invested in
applied statistics and machine learning, hiring excellent researchers and
engineers. Columbia and NYU have announced data science initiatives in the
last 6 months. Very smart people (and others, like me ;) ) are very active in
the community here.

There are some obvious applications of Yann's work to Facebook's advertising
goals:

> Identifying strong friendships through co-occurrence in photos

> Digit or character recognition applied to marketing in photos (shop signs,
> brands, etc)

> Image segment classification (e.g. beach, park, road) for use in predicting
> a photo's location (for those uploaded after the fact)

> All the Instagram photos. I mean seriously. They're committed to making ads
> seamless--why not use image segmentation + likes to identify photographic
> structures people are attracted to?

Can anyone think of others?

~~~
pekk
Facebook has a known, established history of carrying out large-scale,
intrusive personal surveillance. Imagine if I said "NSA already hires
excellent researchers and data scientists ..." We don't legitimize NSA that
way, so why do we legitimize it for Facebook? Does something become morally
acceptable just because it is done for money?

~~~
girvo
Difference is, Facebook can't send me to jail. Or kill me.

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1il7890
Looks awesome for once!

