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Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

instagram-engineering.com

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Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#11

Post by zebby »

SnowingXIV wrote: post #9
gravitas wrote: post #5

It 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.

I see this as an absolute win

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#12

Post by brootstrap »

tempodox wrote: post #7

In 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.

smart. nobody questions it. corporate spends millions making shitty ADs that basically say AI will make our farmers better and therefore help the world. I love when someone asks me about AI and i'm like yeah it's a pile of shit that nobody understands but sells like hot garbage. Now before any hardcode deep learning bros get at me, sure there are cutting edge AI applications and science stuff going on. But i'm talking about commercialized shit that sells AI like a feature. It's just a pile of poop but people gobble it up.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#13

Post by brootstrap »

brenden2 wrote: post #10
thosakwe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah i am totally with you. AI can mean linear regressions and often does.

"look Ma i'm writing my own AI algorithm!!!" ... "writes linear regression by hand in python"

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#14

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

SnowingXIV wrote: post #9
gravitas wrote: post #5

It 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.

> I'm into lifting but my explore has turned into a flood of fit instagram models.

This has been my experience as well. I end up using the "Don't show images like this for this hashtag" feature but they always seem to come back.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#15

Post by confeit »

stuff4ben wrote: post #2

Is 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.

Just read it as "Powered by big data" or "Powered by software" or "Powered by mathematics". It sounds fake and dumb. If it sounds fake and dumb to you, a ML practicioner, then maybe this article was not written for you. If you read the article itself, you get the feeling that AI was tacked on at the last minute, likely with an intent that has nothing to do with knowledge sharing.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#16

Post by raverbashing »

gravitas wrote: post #5

It 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. :)

There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text)

But yeah it can be off-putting.

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#17

Post by bigbadgoose »

brenden2 wrote: post #3
stuff4ben wrote: post #2

Is 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.

During a recent discussion on this topic, this emerged with regard to "what is AI":

A. System should, without prompting, identify areas of improvement and innovation

B. Automated collection of data and the processing thereof, combined with application towards a concrete goal — does not qualify under A.

C. Part of A. is willing and unwilling discovery and exposure to both benevolent and adversarial environments and operating conditions

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#18

Post by brenden2 »

bigbadgoose wrote: post #17
brenden2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything moderately related to software and data is called AI now, because that's what gets the upvotes.

During a recent discussion on this topic, this emerged with regard to "what is AI": A. System should, without prompting, identify areas of improvement and innovation B. Automated collection of data and the processing thereof, combined with application towards a concrete goal — does not qualify under A. C. Part of A. is willing and unwilling discovery and exposure to both benevolent and adversarial environments and op…

This is just moving the goalposts around so that you can take advantage of the hype boost you get from calling everything "AI".

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#19

Post by aspaviento »

gravitas wrote: post #5

It 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 happened to me! For some reason IG decided that I was super interested in barbers of arab countries (what I assumed were arab countries) and it was constantly showing me barbershop videos and fancy men's hair cuts. I had to block all those accounts just to stop the spam (and thankfully they weren't that many).

Re: Instagram’s Explore Recommender System

#20

Post by aspaviento »

raverbashing wrote: post #16
gravitas wrote: post #5

It 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. :)

There is a "see fewer posts like this" button (as mentioned in the text) But yeah it can be off-putting.

In my experience that button does nothing to prevent the spam of images and videos of a certain topic.
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