I know that tech company M.O. is creeping invasiveness by acclimating users to marginally more Orwellian incursions of their privacy over time, but are we already at the point where something like this can gain widespread acceptance? Seems like the willingness of the general populace to prostrate itself to our newfangled corporate overlords is only accelerating.
DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
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Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#92And here I was hoping to see links to published papers or God forbid the release of datasets for fellow researchers... Heck, even a trained model would be nice.
Seems like a PR stunt to attract talent.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like a bug / coincidence. I've never got a later email about something that happened live while I was browsing the site, and was already notified about.
A couple of times is a coincidence. I stopped counting after seven. So you're saying that there's a bug. And the bug waits for me to stop using Facebook, then emails me things from Facebook. I find this quite difficult to believe. At the least, it's a very convenient bug.
They might be doing this to only a subset of their users, for example as part of an A/B test.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#94Isn't "text understanding engine" a poor description of what is basically a classifier? I'd expect a text understanding engine to do more than classify, I'd expect it to read a bunch of sentences in context and then be able to answer questions about it: John was walking down the stairs. John tripped and fell. John lays on the floor. Describe John's status: Is he hurt or in pain? Is he standing?
Facebook have one of the leading teams on doing Deep Learning question answering. Jason Weston et. al wrote a paper introducing a machine-generated textual dataset[1] similar to what you describe, eg:
Daniel picked up the football.
Daniel drops the football.
Daniel got the milk.
Daniel took the apple.
How many objects is Daniel holding?
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you Yes, because they're not doing it for us, but for themselves, investors and customers (advertisers) fueled by our data.
Could Facebook be doing so well because this is actually a win-win situation for everyone involved ? That includes the people you mentioned yes, but also users who get to use a valuable tool for free. The whole "if it's free, you are the product" party line may resonate in HN circles, but you have to realize the public as a whole doesn't think it's a bad deal at all.
If those features had a negative impact on their bottom line they would never offer them for free to everyone so yes, they're doing it for themselves and it just so happens that some people find them useful.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
What scares me about this is the "bubble" it creates, see [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble (even mentions Facebook's news-stream)
In my opinion the bigger problem is, when people are not aware that they're in a bubble. They existed, even before social media and internet searches. E.G. when I was a kid/teen, I got most of the information about the world from one local news paper and one evening news show on tv. Yes, their "newsfeed" wasn't generated by algorithms. But still, it's someone that decided for me what is relevant and what not. Nowaday…
Common man is brought up within the bubble of their parent's beliefs. Intelligent man breaks out of that bubble, once he find it too constraining. Unintelligent man does not. Unintelligent man also have trouble identifying bubbles.
Earth provide opportunities for success for both men. In the long run, one of them will dominate the other.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a slight tangent, but I don't even like the fact that what I see when I type something into Google may not be what others see. I think the inconvenience of having to type "order pizza in $city" rather than just "order pizza" is more than outweighed by not kind of destroying "consensus reality" as far as it pertains to search results, not to mention the potential for really creepy things down the line. It's no…
I read a paper on this recently in class and I think their findings were that most google results are the same other than geographically specific ones like you mentioned. For instance, if we both type "trump", most of the results will be the same unless there is a trump tower near you, in which case it'll direct you to it. Ordering of results however can change.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#98Slightly contrarian, or maybe not-but is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you? Algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own), telling me what I ought to buy (trust me, Amazon if I wanted it-I'd eit…
Yup, this is what will cause me to abandon twitter.
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Game AI uses minmax decisions, so it does simulate the opponent to pick _their_ best move, then it picks the move that removes their best options. That's why it's so unsportsmanlike when losing and why it doesn't go for points when winning. It doesn't have a specific profile of the opponent, though, instead it thinks they're another AlphaGo. That's an area they could work on.
AG doesn't actually use minimax, it uses montecarlo tree search, which doesn't even try to simulate a good opponent, it just plays lots of games very fast.
AG does use minimax in the same sense that for example stockfish does (bounded depth and with pruning)
Re: DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine
#100Slightly contrarian, or maybe not-but is anyone else sort of fatigued with social media trying it's hardest to do it all for you? Algorithmic timelines telling me what happened while I was gone (trust me, twitter...I would have gotten to it eventually), prioritizing what shows up (trust me facebook, I do a very good job hiding content on my own), telling me what I ought to buy (trust me, Amazon if I wanted it-I'd eit…
Well, do you filter your own spam too?
The problem to me comes only when the big corporate AI systems no longer are fully on your side, like spam filters which let the "right" spam through.