Your Instagram #Dogs and #Cats Are Training Facebook's AI
Using a social network like Facebook is a two-way street, part-shrouded in shadow. The benefits of sharing banter and photos with friends and family—for free—are obvious and immediate. So are the financial rewards for Facebook; but you don’t get to see all of the company’s uses for your data.
An artificial intelligence experiment of unprecedented scale disclosed by Facebook Wednesday offers a glimpse of one such use case. It shows how our social lives provide troves of valuable data for training machine-learning algorithms. It’s a resource that could help Facebook compete with Google, Amazon, and other tech giants with their own AI ambitions.
Facebook researchers describe using 3.5 billion public Instagram photos—carrying 17,000 hashtags appended by users—to train algorithms to categorize images for themselves. It provided a way to sidestep having to pay humans to label photos for such projects. The cache of Instagram photos is more than 10 times the size of a giant training set for image algorithms disclosed by Google last July.
