Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
instagram-engineering.com
Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
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Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#2Is this really AI? This seems like simple classification and ranking. Honestly I didn't see anything new in there that hasn't been around for the past 10 years. KNN? NDCG? That's entry level ML. TFA does throw around neural networks a bit, but doesn't go into any detail.
EDIT: Maybe I'm just thrown off by the "Powered by AI" part of the article title. I was expecting more I suppose.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#3Is this really AI? This seems like simple classification and ranking. Honestly I didn't see anything new in there that hasn't been around for the past 10 years. KNN? NDCG? That's entry level ML. TFA does throw around neural networks a bit, but doesn't go into any detail. EDIT: Maybe I'm just thrown off by the "Powered by AI" part of the article title. I was expecting more I suppose.
Anything moderately related to software and data is called AI now, because that's what gets the upvotes.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#4It's so interesting how powerful word embeddings (or in this case account embeddings) are. This reminds me a bit of the 538 article[1] about doing math on subreddits - I'd be interested to see what sort of math you could do on instagram account embeddings. What happens when you subtract two celebrities from each other?
Also, I'm curious about the tradeoffs of revealing this information - does knowing this make it easier to game the instagram algorithm? From this article I'd think that having a more narrowly targeted account (for example someone putting selfies on one account and landscape photos on another) might make their embedding more similar to others. Another thought is that maybe someone liking a bunch of things unrelated to their content would make them wrongly appear in certain explore pages.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-...
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#5It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't be tuned by the end user easily. You learn pretty quick to never look even once at something you don't want a whole lot of that same thing force-fed to you - on the other hand, start looking at huskies and you'll get tons of puppers filling your explore. :)
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#6It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't be tuned by the end user easily. You learn pretty quick to never look even once at something you don't want a whole lot of that same thing force-fed to you - on the other hand, start looking at huskies and you'll get tons of puppers filling your explore. :)
That is one of the things I like about the YouTube one - the option to remove from your view history seemingly does have an effect on the recommendation engine.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#7In the past, when you wrote code you didn't understand yourself, you'd call it “experimental” and maybe open-sourced it. Now, when you write code you don't understand yourself, you call it “AI”, put a patent on it and sell it for a shitload of money. That's progress.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#8Is this really AI? This seems like simple classification and ranking. Honestly I didn't see anything new in there that hasn't been around for the past 10 years. KNN? NDCG? That's entry level ML. TFA does throw around neural networks a bit, but doesn't go into any detail. EDIT: Maybe I'm just thrown off by the "Powered by AI" part of the article title. I was expecting more I suppose.
Anything moderately related to software and data is called AI now, because that's what gets the upvotes.
AFAIK classification, deep learning, ML, etc. all are valid subsets of AI
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#9It can go pretty wrong - look at a picture of a gun one time and IG will start shoving gun pictures down your throat, it's horribly non-forgiving and can't be tuned by the end user easily. You learn pretty quick to never look even once at something you don't want a whole lot of that same thing force-fed to you - on the other hand, start looking at huskies and you'll get tons of puppers filling your explore. :)
Agreed, it would be preferable if you could turn it off altogether and just get a wide variety of popular posts as that seems to match the title of 'explore' more closely. I'm into lifting but my explore has turned into a flood of fit instagram models.
Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything moderately related to software and data is called AI now, because that's what gets the upvotes.
AFAIK classification, deep learning, ML, etc. all are valid subsets of AI
It's more like complex linear regressions. The term "AI" evokes the idea of computers possessing something similar to human intelligence which it very much is not. We don't even properly understand how the human brain works.