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

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.

Comments

Experts

[Headw1nd]

What does that even mean? What percentage in any field can be called experts? Also, where would you find a full staff of "AI experts"?

Are there answers to these questions behind the paywall? I'm guessing no.

Normal, expected, and a problem

[alispguru]

The real problem with modern, "deep learning" AI is that usually not even the experts can tell you how such systems work.

The most they can tell you is:

* The model makes the choices we labeled on our training data set
* We add stuff to the training set as it makes detected mistakes

The weights in the neural network after training become an opaque fuzzy partition of the training set.

Does this inspire confidence in you? Me neither.