In the article and this thread: a bunch of people who have never spent serious sums on Facebook trashing FBs targeting. I have spent large amounts of money targeting niche audiences on Facebook. The targeting is unparalelled by anything else on the web.
Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
101–110 of 134 posts
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, nobody is claiming that people were living in caves before ML. I understand you're exaggerating for effect -- but that's the same thing the parent comment is doing when they say something "wasn't possible" 5 years ago. They don't mean that it was literally impossible, they mean that it was sufficiently bad that a typical consumer would be unlikely to use it back then -- whereas now the quality has improved to…
>they mean that it was uncommon for a typical consumer to experience it back then. Siri from Apple was launched in 2011, as some other commenter noted below. Also, "On June 14, 2011, Google announced at its Inside Google Search event that it would start to roll out Voice Search on Google.com during the coming days". If it does not count as 'typical consumer to experience it', well, I do not know what counts then. 9 y…
Siri stumbles at way less complex queries than that. Every year or so I retry using it, and give up due to the error rate. An accuracy of 99% and 10x slower is apparently preferable for me.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
>recognize voices. All these things were not possible 5 years ago. FTR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997. As of 2012 LG Smart TVs include voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
Yeah I played with dragon in 97 and it was awful - it didn’t work at all, completely unusable. Today voice transcription is a solved problem and while their engine might be the same in name - I’d be surprised if the approach isn’t totally different than what they were doing in 97, either that or the LG tv voice transcription probably doesn’t work as well as everyone else’s. The deep learning revolution and the applic…
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#104I know everyone loves to hate Facebook and articles that confirm that bias are very popular right now, but this lawsuit doesn't seem to have smoking gun evidence like the headline suggests. Have you ever written an e-mail or Slack message to a peer complaining that something at your company might not be working well? Or that something is totally broken and you think it should be prioritized in the ticket queue? Imagi…
People are finally coming around to what eBay learned a while ago.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah - entire classes of problems went from unsolvable to solved. Some of that is in the consumer space and some of it is not. I feel like an AGI could accidentally wipe out half of humanity and there would still be people commenting on HN about how the exact same technology already existed in a roomba seven years ago.
Honest question, no snark --- which consumer space problems were solved, if I don't play Go and don't have FB account to recognize me on a group photos (both of these two statements are true)?
- Voice transcription
- Tesla Autopilot
- Facial recognition (photo sorting on iphones, better photos)
- Better graphical performance on Nvidia cards (https://developer.nvidia.com/dlss), also better compression for streaming.
- Much better translation
- Colorizing and repairing old photos
- Visual recognition allowing better search of images
I’m sure there are some I left out. I think we’ll see a lot more interesting applications (particularly around tooling) in the next few years.
https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35
Outside of the consumer space, there are also things that hint at more generalizable intelligence.
Check out GPT-3’s performance on arithmetic tasks in the original paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165)
Pages: 21-23, 63
Which shows some generality, the best way to accurately predict an arithmetic answer is to deduce how the mathematical rules work. That paper shows some evidence of that and that’s just from a relatively dumb predict what comes next model.
It’s hard to predict timelines for this kind of thing, and people are notoriously bad at it. Nobody would have predicted the results we’re seeing today in 2010. What would you expect to see in the years leading up to AGI? Does what we’re seeing look like failure?
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/muzero-mastering-go-chess-...
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#106Anecdotally, FB shows me the same ads on repeat: Few are relevant, and the same ones repeat past a threshold I'd assume would indicate I'm not interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM
As someone who runs facebook ads for ecomm, repeated targeting are a core part of making facebook ads profitable. You'll almost never make money by running a simple, one-step ad with a link to your website. What we do is to target a group of people with a simple ad, then people who engage with or leave impressions on that ad will be run into a second ad, and so on and so forth until you finally funnel them into a con…
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#107Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computer vision is used for many driver assistance technologies, which are a big deal for ease of life.
People obsess too much over minor conveniences. I don't care about driving. It still takes the same amount of time. What I care more about is cooking. I'd rather have that one solved, as it would actually save me time. (No, I'm not looking for restaurants, meal delivery services or microwave meals).
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't care about driving. It still takes the same amount of time. If it would be automated, the you would be able to use this time for something else rather than driving.
In theory yes, in practice mostly no.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#110This shows the limitations of ML: facebook has incredible amounts of preference & behaviour data on its users; and can't even meet incredibly generic categories such as "high-earner, college educated, etc.". The reason we think we're in an "AI" boom is 90% these ad. companies hyping their own abilities (an identical strategy to that of the initial boom in the 50s). What we call "AI" today is just an associative house…
According to FB metrics, FB AI magic works great. Then again, according to FB metrics video engaged better than text ... and it turns out they were lying. I wouldn’t put it past them to goose the numbers a bit for their core product.