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Facebook's AI lab

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Re: Facebook's AI lab

#21

Post by yangtheman »

Am I the only one who is skeptical about this announcement? I am sure the amount of data Facebook has will be huge asset to any sort of AI development, but precisely because of the amount of data and the kinds of data they have, it's just scary what this could be used for...

AI that has personal information of 500M+ people, using it to manipulate people...(first to click on advertisements, and then much more). In the hands of government, I shudder to think what's possible. With NSA already snooping around, perhaps it's not all that distant.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#22

Post by krebby »

aioprisan wrote: post #18

I took LeCun's class in undergrad at NYU and it definitely wasn't easy. He's a fantastic speaker, definitely made it more enjoyable.

Same here. His Machine Learning course was one of the hardest but most rewarding classes I've ever taken. Definitely glad to see him expanding his reach outside of Academia.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#23

Post by anoncowherd »

lucb1e wrote: post #12

I'm not sure what I should think of this. What are your thoughts with regard to the amount of personal information that Facebook possesses? Regardless of whether they are good or evil, what do you think the potential implications are? I'm curious about HN's thoughts.

>> What are your thoughts with regard to the amount of personal information that Facebook possesses?

"Fucking disgusting"

>> Regardless of whether they are good or evil, what do you think the potential implications are?

Less privacy, more data in the hands of governments, more police state.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#24

Post by logn »

mikeg8 wrote: post #19
swalsh wrote: 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.

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.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#25

Post by btown »

mturmon wrote: post #2

Star power at NIPS: "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CTO Michael Schroepfer and I are at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Lake Tahoe today. Mark will announce the news during his presentation at the NIPS Workshop on Deep Learning later today." It seems Zuckerberg will have an apres-ski Q&A, and be in a panel discussion at day's end ( https://sites.google.com/site/deeplearningworkshopnips2013/s...…

At NIPS now. There have been rumors going around that Zuckerberg might have just been interested in attending, giving a casual Q&A, not announcing anything like this - but with this announcement, I foresee them having to take down all of the dividers in Harveys ;)

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#26

Post by btown »

msoad wrote: post #9
dhammack wrote: post #7

Can you imagine the datasets FB has to work with? Statuses, pictures, locations, social graphs. It's incredible. It's hard to blame LeCun/Hinton/Ng for moving towards industry with data like that. I'd bet that the only place with more data than FB/Google is our good friends at the NSA.

My friend used to work at NSA research. He said they don't have much ready to use data yet

Apparently, it's because NSA researchers are spending all their time playing WoW instead.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#27

Post by larrybolt »

demonicus wrote: post #15

"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.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#29

Post by Irishsteve »

swalsh wrote: 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 looks like they don't have anything particularly taxing compared to the likes of Google. There is only so much they can apply to the FB feed. Graph search while cool still isn't that advanced.

Re: Facebook's AI lab

#30

Post by TrainedMonkey »

swalsh wrote: 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.

Value of Facebook consists of two things, you and your data. It is not good for long term strategy of Facebook to hurt either.

Here are some things where smart AI could help: 1. Better filtering of spam bots. 2. Better filtering of ads that would significantly improve ad quality. 3. Smart assistant that learns your habits and makes smart suggestions such as: which events to attend, your writing style, and filters immediate notifications based on personalized importance score.

Or Facebook could exploit machine learning/AI techniques to simply drive up click through ratio on their ads.

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