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.
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...<p>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.
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>.<p></i> I own Facebook stock, so I might be biased.
Rob Fergus is joining Facebook too:<p><a href="https://plus.google.com/103199870243230279182/posts/JaqgU1sXkdN" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/103199870243230279182/posts/JaqgU1sX...</a>
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.
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.
Star power at NIPS:<p>"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."<p>It seems Zuckerberg will have an apres-ski Q&A, and be in a panel discussion at day's end (<a href="https://sites.google.com/site/deeplearningworkshopnips2013/schedule" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/deeplearningworkshopnips2013/s...</a>). Hope the room is big enough.
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.<p>I bet the guys over at Fort Meade are beside themselves with happiness over this :-)
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.<p>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?
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.
The combination of AI and social networks reminds me of Friendship is Optimal[1].<p>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 <i>optimizing</i> the real world.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/</a>
I hope these labs are as productive as Google or the old DEC labs: <a href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/</a>
<i>random thoughts on this announcement</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>There are some obvious applications of Yann's work to Facebook's advertising goals:<p>> Identifying strong friendships through co-occurrence in photos<p>> Digit or character recognition applied to marketing in photos (shop signs, brands, etc)<p>> Image segment classification (e.g. beach, park, road) for use in predicting a photo's location (for those uploaded after the fact)<p>> 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?<p>Can anyone think of others?