Facebook: Will Its Artificial Intelligence Understand France, Russia, and the EU?

January 25, 2019

According to one prominent expert, Facebook has gone all in on AI. A write-up at Analytics India Magazine reports, “Yann LeCun Says Facebook is ‘Dust’ Without Deep Learning, and No One is Disagreeing.” Writer Abhijeet Katte reports on comments LeCun made in a recent CNN interview. Katte writes:

“The French AI expert who played a pivotal role in setting up Facebook’s lab in Paris shared in an interview to CNN, ‘If you take the deep learning out of Facebook today, Facebook’s dust. It’s entirely built around it now.’ The statement typifies the current stand on technology by Mark Zuckerberg led Menlo Park giant which has been embattled over its role in US elections. Even though statement has been largely dubbed controversial, LeCun summed up Facebook’s transformation around AI and ML succinctly. Over the last three to four years, Facebook has been slowly but surely transforming its business around intelligent systems technology. The change can be seen in features such as posts, translations and newsfeed algorithms which is the core of the social network platform. Facebook applied deep learning to combat hate speech and misinformation in countries like Myanmar. The social media giant was criticized when the platform was said to have fueled ethnic violence against the Rohingya population. The company also said AI application created by Facebook is now capable of flagging 52 percent of all content it gets rid of in Myanmar before it is reported by users.”

The article goes on to list several ways Facebook has incorporated deep learning—FB Learner Flow, the “backbone” of the company’s AI; the convolutional neural network system Building Perception; and text-comprehension-engine DeepText, which is said to go beyond traditional NLP and can work on multiple languages. Though LeCun’s observation seems to have stirred some controversy, would it be so surprising for Facebook to become almost entirely dependent on AI tech?

Facebook may have to be dependent upon human attorneys.

Cynthia Murrell, January 25, 2019

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