Mar 8, 2021
Instagram photos help Facebook AI 'teach itself'
One billion public-facing Instagram photos were used to train an algorithm created by Facebook to learn to recognise images by itself. Traditionally, algorithms have been trained on datasets which have already been categorised by humans - labelled cats, dogs or flowers, for example. The Instagram photos were presented to the algorithm without the labelling. "With images, the algorithm must decide which pixel belongs to which concept. Furthermore, the same concept will vary greatly between images, such as with a cat in different poses or viewed from different angles," the firm wrote in a blog. Prof Sandra Wachter from the Oxford Internet Institute said that while overall the research was "Very promising", it was still important to understand how the algorithm was reaching its decisions if it was not being led by human input.
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