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Facebook's AI lab

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Re: Facebook's AI lab

#81

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

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.

Link to the article?

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#82
post #70
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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!

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?

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#83
post #24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agreed. Not looking that forward to this.

Companies like Facebook and Google do a lot though to promote these areas by building great generic tools. Their work in, say, map-reduce has been invaluable to a wide range of applications.

Again, these applications are important to their customers (advertisers), not to the users. And while the research might be reused somewhere else, these companies are so big that the negative impact to users will be much larger.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Link to the article?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6875879

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#86
post #80

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 wa…

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?

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

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#87
post #10

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.

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." -- Nathaniel Borenstein

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

just like nobody is being forced to speak english, or go to university, or work some terrible shitty job?

This is one thing that people often miss-understand, just because there is no explicit threat of retaliation does not mean systematic coercion does not exist.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an increasing amount of peer pressure though.

"How is any of that Facebooks fault?" As repeated by resonator several posts up.

None of the previous replies addressed this question, so I think it's unfair to downvote this.

As I see it, Facebook could at least attempt to act like they have the user's best interest at heart. This means actively educating them about privacy, risks, and not setting defaults to public. Also not everything on private as this would confuse some people, but at least use non-public and reasonable settings. And/or have a public discussion about it.

Facebook is becoming ubiquitous enough that it's almost something like "internet" or "calling" in general. For such services we have made laws, e.g. in the Netherlands there is a net neutrality law, and sending spam is illegal. But for individual website we have no laws, nor do I think we can make any in the near future without a huge lot of fuzz about it. I'm not saying governments should make laws for Facebook to follow, I'm just saying it won't any time soon, if at all.

So then how do we make sure such a big service acts in our best interest? I think Facebook should start acting less like a for-profit company and more like a government would. Not with elections per se, but at least act in the public's interest instead of working against the users.

And that is how I'd answer the question of "how is this Facebook's fault?". Being a popular for-profit company is not a 'fault', but with so many users they have a responsibility, and I think that it's fair if we, hackers that understand the technology, try to make them act responsibly.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#90
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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