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Facebook's AI Unlocks the Ability To Search Photos By What's in Them (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the sounds-creepy dept.

An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: Initially used to improve the experience for visually impaired members of the Facebook community, the company's Lumos computer vision platform is now powering image content search for all users. This means you can now search for images on Facebook with keywords that describe the contents of a photo, rather than being limited by tags and captions. To accomplish the task, Facebook trained an ever-fashionable deep neural network on tens of millions of photos. Facebook's fortunate in this respect because its platform is already host to billions of captioned images. The model essentially matches search descriptors to features pulled from photos with some degree of probability.

9 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Still Not AI by Luthair · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sorry, but this is still not AI.

    1. Re:Still Not AI by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Probably a good thing it's not too intelligent. Can you imagine if google was a person, the kind of sanity destroying crap it would have to deal with? Facebook's poor AI will be bombarded by dubious requests.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Still Not AI by Luthair · · Score: 2

      Just because a small number of PR people in silicon valley are misusing a term doesn't mean the rest of the world has to accept it.

    3. Re:Still Not AI by spire3661 · · Score: 2

      Appeal to Authority fallacy. Colleges are not the final word on AI. College taught me a bunch of shit that was completely useless and behind the times too.

      --
      Good-bye
    4. Re:Still Not AI by sexconker · · Score: 2

      Have you ever taken AI class in college? What do you think they teach you, how to develop conscious robots?

      I have. Machine Learning and AI were separate courses. In the Machine Learning course you get a lot of practical shit and some theory.

      In the AI course you get a lot of theory and some practical shit. Terms like "neural net" and "deep learning" are bandied about and there's talk about current research working to simulate a brain to some degree or use organic/fuzzy computing of some sort to mimic the brain's functions. On the practical side, it's all just the same "machine learning" shit from the previous course, but with clever feedback and bootstrapping mechanisms.

      I'm not knocking either course (they were pretty good and the same professor ran both courses). But the state of AI is no where near creating something that could pass as intelligence, even if some pieces can surpass human ability in certain tasks or mimic humans decently in a chat program after data mining billions of lines of conversation.

    5. Re:Still Not AI by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is NO formal agreed-upon definition of AI and experts, philosophers, and pundits argue forever and ever over it. Givvittup.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    6. Re:Still Not AI by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

      An important part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. That's what the computers are doing.

    7. Re:Still Not AI by e3m4n · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Probably a good thing it's not too intelligent. Can you imagine if google was a person, the kind of sanity destroying crap it would have to deal with? Facebook's poor AI will be bombarded by dubious requests.

      My opinion of the average Facebook user is about as high as my opinion of people on AOL back in the 90s. If it were a full fledged AI there is no doubt that the assumption it drew from its average sampling of humans would definitely make it go SkyNet on all of us.

  2. Re: agreed upon formal definitions by hackwrench · · Score: 2

    Nor for that matter is there one for intelligence.