Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
AI Facebook

Facebook Runs On AI - But 70% of Its Engineers Who Use AI Aren't Experts (wsj.com) 91

Posted by msmash 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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Facebook Runs On AI - But 70% of Its Engineers Who Use AI Aren't Experts More

Facebook Runs On AI - But 70% of Its Engineers Who Use AI Aren't Experts

Comments Filter:

  • It's called "specialization" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CajunArson ( 465943 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:14PM (#55417977) Journal

    You might as well say that Facebook's AI runs on electricity and (generously) 99% of Facebook's engineers aren't experts in electricity generation and distribution either.

    • Re:It's called "specialization" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by plague911 ( 1292006 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @01:00PM (#55418281)

      Agreed, this is nonsense. When I was programming I used compilers, I sure as heck was not a compiler expert. At best I could be an expert in using compilers and that would be fine.

      Even with teams as large as they are now in common environments, you can afford to have one expert at compilers creating your optimum build packages

      It should even be uncommon to have the expert utilizing the technology they are an expert at building. Those roles are often separated out for good reason.

      • In a nascent field, most of the users are also experts. It comes with the territory.

        The specialization into designers and expert users indicates maturation of the field. This is what happens when people take your technology and build something new on top of it.

        In fact, this specialization may be the only universal metric of maturity---anything else I can imagine does not apply historically.

    • Re:It's called "specialization" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @01:11PM (#55418343)
      They probably drive cars to work every day, too.

      And I'll bet not a one of them is an expert car designer. Or even capable of designing a basic internal combustion engine....

    • Well, AI is huge field, just like mathematics or computer science. Just because you are an expert in your subdomain within AI doesn't mean that you are better than average in another domain. Right now, we are seeing an explosion of research and techniques in AI, so even a field in which you might be an expert is growing so rapidly that you might find yourself falling behind. At best, you might claim to be an expert in some sub-subdomain. The other question is what qualifies as an expert? There seems t

  • Experts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Headw1nd ( 829599 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:16PM (#55417981)
    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.

  • Expert these days has come to mean someone with a paper credential.

    Even their head of machine learning is calling it an AI platform. He's clearly one of those "experts."

  • Isn't this as if I were using libc or, god forbid, libc++, boost even, while not being an "expert" there? I'm pretty certain it would take me an obscene amount of effort to even replicate some of the stuff in boost, for example.

    Isn't this all that modern development has been trying to achieve since forever?

  • Judging from the posts I saw on Facebook it was running on "No Intelligence".

  • Congrats (Score:5, Insightful)

    by e r ( 2847683 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:19PM (#55418005)
    So this is a triumph for the engineers that put that stuff together: it can be used by non-experts to meaningful effect.
    • Yeah, but by next month we'll be hearing about how it was Facebook AI that was actually responsible for getting Trump elected. So either it isn't very intelligent, or it's incredibly intelligent but possibly evil.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I've come to the conclusion that Facebook draws in mostly sub 100 IQ people - which is not coincidentally everyone that votes either Democrat or Republican.

        The most intelligent people are not part of that system because they know Facebook, like our two party system, is inherently untrustworthy.

    • define meaningful

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by e r ( 2847683 )
        "meaningful" == people are using it to do their jobs day-to-day.

        I won't argue about whether those jobs themselves are useful or good.
        I'm only saying that people who are doing those jobs are doing it with the help of a system they don't understand nor do they need to understand it.

  • Creating AI Models is Easy (Score:3)

    by Herkum01 ( 592704 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:25PM (#55418043)

    It is prepping the data that is hard. The Machine Learning Algorithms have been established for a long time. The big limiters on it have been processing power and decent data sets.

    • It is prepping the data that is hard.

      The users do that. FB just asks them to "tag" their friends in photos.

  • Security (Score:5, Insightful)

    by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:26PM (#55418049) Journal
    How many developers understand encryption algorithms that they use for security... this is the point of libraries?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by QuietLagoon ( 813062 )

      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.

  • I drive a car... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:30PM (#55418079)

    but I'm not a fucking mechanic.

  • It doesn't work for me... (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday October 23, 2017 @12:48PM (#55418199)
    ... some as simple as the fact that i like to see my newsfeed with Recent Posts first, instead of what Facebook thinks I want to see first, is beyond the capability of the Facebook AI. Each time I go to Facebook,, I have to set the option to show Recent Posts first. If the Facebook AI can't get that right, what can it get right?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's working exactly as intended. Furthermore, from my understanding, Recent Posts first may not show all newer posts. The user isn't in control, Facebook is. Presumably, much of Facebook's AI is designed to keep users on site long as possible, keeping them coming back, and bringing in new users.

      • It's working exactly as intended....

        By annoying me to the point that I leave the Facebook site quickly and frustrated that the site doesn't do what I want it to do? Shouldn't a good AI learn what I want and give it to me?

      • It's working exactly as intended. Furthermore, from my understanding, Recent Posts first may not show all newer posts. The user isn't in control, Facebook is. Presumably, much of Facebook's AI is designed to keep users on site long as possible, keeping them coming back, and bringing in new users.

        You mean that users have to look through all older posts to ensure that they have seen all newer posts? Then yes, FB' AI successfully forces users to be on their site for a long time. Not sure that has to do with coming back and bringing new users part though...

  • Facebook like many big-data/cloud companies who implore this technology operate and profit from the intelligence of their users. Their algorithms only mine and correlate it. They don't say this because it shows the emperor nor their algorithm has clothes. The algorithm being utilized by companies as of now is one which functions on large data sets, correlation, optimization, and brute force state space traversal w/ incremental combinatorics. It isn't intelligent. It doesn't embody intelligence and they by a
    • <br> please; I do apologize (you appear to be new here; welcome, and beware of trolls) , but Slashdot's text formatting capabilities are still stuck in 1997. You must make all line breaks manually with a <br> tag.
      • Sorry to hear this. I also note that you can't edit a post. I would have made sure to correct this in future. However, I am just here to post this one thing. Take it for the fruit that it could potentially be.... formatting aside.

  • Normal, expected, and a problem (Score:4, Interesting)

    by alispguru ( 72689 ) <bob,bane&me,com> on Monday October 23, 2017 @01:11PM (#55418341) Journal

    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.

  • The entire point of expert systems [wikipedia.org] is to distill the reasoning process of experts so that you don't have to have one of those available to you at all times.

    In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert

    Honestly, having as much as 30% of the users being experts kind of sounds like a waste to me.

  • Probably for the same reason that nuclear power stations aren't staffed with scientists. They want people to read gauges, push buttons, pull levers, etc. rather than attempting to solve every (seemingly) trivial issue that comes their way. Also (probably) costs less.
  • That's the biggest issue with Facebook right now.
  • but only 1% (or some shit like that) are experienced at OS or compiler development. News at 11 (btw, 80% of all statistics are made up, including this one, turtles all the way down.)

  • It's about having good tools. You don't need to know the details of AI to go through the process of building a data set and making practical use of machine learning. It's somewhat like how many programmers don't know digital electronics or assembler but are still able to write software. We're far enough along with machine learning that you aren't starting from scratch for each project, it's more of a modular system and much of it can be setup and configured with GUI tools now.

  • More of the article:

    'If you look at all the engineers at Facebook, more than one in four are users of our AI platform,' says Mr. Candela [head of applied AI]. '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. Candela 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.

    This implies of the 25% of FB's engineers who use company AI services, 70% invoke it via a simple API without delving into the infrastructure or tuning it themselves.

    Therefore only 7.5% of FB's AI users (30% of 25%) pass the Turing Test.

  • Also in today's non-news:

    Most software runs on an operating system, but 90% of the software engineers who write applications aren't OS experts.

  • Even if it isn't Not likely to see real AI for another 100 years. What we have now are machines that have better decision matrices, but they are not intelligent. If it doesn't have asimov's 3 laws programmed in, then it will be incredibly dangerous.
  • ...to show pictures of food and cats ?

    Give me a break, FaceBook software is idiotically trivial.  The single hardest task FB engineers face is how to distribute the data, and that is a problem that is mostly solved by hardware.

Slashdot Top Deals

E = MC ** 2 +- 3db

Close