Inside Facebook’s AI Machine – Backchannel (Feb 23, 2017)
Backchannel (and Steven Levy in particular) seems to be becoming the default outlet (I was going to say channel) for these access-y pieces on AI and machine learning. Levy previously did something very similar for Apple last August, Amazon in November, and Google in October. And there continues to be a perceived need for this kind of thing because AI continues to be something that’s mostly talked about rather than seen by consumers. That’s not to say that it’s not in products – it clearly is, and the money quote from this article is that “Facebook today cannot exist without AI” – but that it’s not intuitively obvious to consumers that AI is behind a lot of what they use. Companies still need to tell their AI stories, particularly because narratives have emerged about Google being ahead or Apple being behind, and those narratives need to be countered. There are several interesting things in this particular article, but as that quote indicates the biggest thing that comes out of it for me is how central AI and machine learning are becoming to almost everything at Facebook. Secondarily, it’s interesting to see Facebook in some cases do complex processing on the phone itself, something Apple has pioneered but which others have largely eschewed in favor of cloud processing.
via Backchannel
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