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Facebook Runs On AI - But 70% of Its Engineers Who Use AI Aren't Experts (wsj.com)

Posted by msmash on from the things-to-ponder dept.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a WSJ report: AI algorithms are inherently black boxes whose workings can be next to impossible to understand -- even by many Facebook engineers. "If you look at all the engineers at Facebook, more than one in four are users of our AI platform," says Mr. Candela. "But more than 70% [of those] aren't experts." How so many Facebook engineers can use its AI algorithms without necessarily knowing how to build them, Mr. Joaquin Candela, Facebook's head of applied machine learning says, is that the system is "a very modular layered cake where you can plug in at any level you want." He adds, "The power of this is just hard to describe." Pieces of that platform are performing all kinds of "domain-specific" tasks across Facebook's properties, from translation to speech recognition.

2 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. None of it is real 'AI' by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    It's all fake nonsense 'learning algorithms' and 'expert systems' and 'decision trees' and other junk that isn't really Artficial Intelligence anyway, what's there to be an expert about? Also it's Facebook so who cares, give it another few years and it'll go the way of Myspace and Livejournal anyway and Zuckerberg will be sitting on a beach in Fiji with all the money he made off your personal and private data he stole. Seriously get over it people don't you realize that the current approach to AI is a dead end? It'll never be everything they keep hyping it to be, it'll always fall short. Give it another 100 years or so and we might figure out how real cognition works and then be able to actually design that into hardware but until then it's this half-assed imitation that isn't capable of real thought or real reasoning and will always fall short of the mark with potentially disasterous results.

  2. Re:Security by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2, Informative

    How many developers understand encryption algorithms that they use for security... this is the point of libraries?

    Not enough developers understand encryption algorithms (and it shows), and libraries don't help because they still allow the misuse of encryption.