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Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

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Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#131

Post by Nadya »

CPLX wrote: post #130
pluma wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Edison had mostly been dismissed as not even remotely as great an inventor as most people thought he was?

To a tiny universe of Reddit/XKCD readers perhaps. In the rest of the world, for example at the offices of Con Edison, or in the city of Edison, New Jersey, he's still considered to be somewhat important.

Don't forget The Oatmeal readers! [0]

There's a billion and one things one could mention about Tesla. Sadly, only the tiny universe of people who dislike Edison (and see him as a businessman, not an inventor) are aware of Tesla's contributions.

[0] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#135

Post by aeturnum »

What a silly conclusion. The fact that a human called his land line does not mean M (the thing in messenger) isn't an AI. At best, it proves that M has humans who work for M making phone calls.

I don't have any insight or opinion about the question of how human M is, but this article seems makes a bunch of assumptions that make the whole investigation somewhat silly.

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#136

Post by downandout »

Clearly there are some humans behind M that are doing things that Facebook would rather entrust to humans (like making phone calls). However, the phone call only proves that this specific aspect of M is human.

In the end, though, I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm going to guess that the ultimate end-game on M is for Facebook to collect advertising/affiliate revenue from recommending things. For example, if someone asks for a Chinese restaurant, plumber, dentist, lawyer, etc. in their city, the one they suggest could be the one that paid Facebook for it. As long as these types of fees make it profitable for Facebook, it doesn't matter if the service needs to be powered by millions of humans. In fact, that would be great - it would mean millions of new jobs.

Larry Page famously told an early investor that Google wasn't yet sure how it would make money, but that search was the only situation in which people would tell a computer what they wanted, and that there had to be a way to make money from that. M is exactly the same - a way to get people to tell Facebook what they want, and it puts them in a great position to monetize it.

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#137

Post by csn »

Gankro wrote: post #39
tux3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is always impressive to me, I didn't realize a thing until "tlaknig"! Although I suppose you could specifically train an AI to recogize this.

To be clear, this is applying the classic observation that if you keep the first and last letter correct, humans are really good at unjumbling the center.

Slpmiy jnilbumg the iennr cretcarahs tlsuhy rrednes tihs "ooitavresbn" qlbanoitseue, imo

edit: 'Simply jumbling the inner characters thusly renders this "observation" questionable, imo'

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#139

Post by CPLX »

Nadya wrote: post #131
CPLX wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a tiny universe of Reddit/XKCD readers perhaps. In the rest of the world, for example at the offices of Con Edison, or in the city of Edison, New Jersey, he's still considered to be somewhat important.

Don't forget The Oatmeal readers! [0] There's a billion and one things one could mention about Tesla. Sadly, only the tiny universe of people who dislike Edison (and see him as a businessman, not an inventor) are aware of Tesla's contributions. [0] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

Whoops. In my head that while Tesla rant was an XKCD thing.

Re: Facebook M – The Anti-Turing Test

#140

Post by grahamburger »

andreasvc wrote: post #46
fab1an wrote: post #5

Facebook's strategy here is to build an AI brand before they have the actual technology, which could make a lot of sense. At the same time the interactions between M's team and its users will provide meaningful data to train the AI on.

I've never heard vaporware characterized as something that "could make a lot of sense"; how could it? Plus I'm doubtful whether the data would be very meaningful. A bunch of people adversarially trying to figure out whether the AI is real is not representative or generally useful data.

I see it as similar to Uber building a system for scheduling self-driving cars before they have the self-driving cars.
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