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schrep

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CTO of Facebook www.facebook.com/schrep

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Your work was so impactful over a long period from Firefox to Facebook. Honored to have been a small part of it.

Our products aren't perfect, and we understand that we have a lot of work to do.

However, the fundamental purpose of our products is to allow people to efficiently communicate with each other. Hard for me to square that with "drain on society." I have many friends who, via Facebook, found a connection that was life changing: from finding a job, a spouse, to a community to deal with the loss of a loved one or support after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

One of the things that draws AI researchers to come work at Facebook is the opportunity to see their work make a positive impact on billions of people around the world.

The research done by FAIR is helping us do things like deliver billions of translations a day, provide automatic photo captions for people who are visually impaired, and help bring blood donors and people in need together. It also helps us spot when someone is expressing thoughts about self-harm so we can alert first responders.

But we also believe there's even more we can do to help bring the world closer together, to give people a voice, and to open up new opportunities for everyone. AI is a key part of that and we believe pretty deeply in the power of open research to help not just us but the whole industry.

This was a bug. There was an old feature that used to allow you to record and post directly from the browser. Those videos were streamed to FB as they were being recorded. If you decided not to post those draft videos should have been deleted but were not. They showed up in download your information (DYI) as expected because that tool is designed to show you the data Facebook has about you. Thanks to New York Magazine for the flag. If you see anything in DYI that doesn't look right, let us know and we'll investigate. This was a bug, and we really do appreciate any help in finding them so we can fix them.

I totally get that view and it bums me out. I can say there is reasoned debate about the different licenses as you can see in this thread. We've changed an explicit patent grant into a debated implicit one. We thought the first was clearer to folks but when debate turned into action we decided winning the debate wasn't important we should just do what would allow people to use the code. I know big companies can look opaque and self-interested on the outside so I get your view. Just sharing as someone part of the internal discussions what happened and why.

That’s impressive work. Still don’t think we have reached human level for all the categories of things we see in images. But you are correct that my comment about 1k categories is not true for many production systems.

This is some of the most advanced work out there - but CV is not “solved” most vision systems only can label about 1k categories of objects. So capatchas can still be easiy constructed that would fool these systems. Part of why it is exciting to get this out there others can help us improve it.

We actually encounter Thundering Herd problems on a very regular basis. The Starbucks page has nearly 14M fans and posts may get tens of thousands of comments/likes with a high update rate. You have a lot of readers on a frequently changed value which means it is not often current in cache and you can have a pileup on the database.

Since we encounter this on a regular basis we have built a few different systems to gracefully handle them.

Unfortunately, the event today was not just a thundering herd because the value never converged. All clients who fetched the value from a db thought it was invalid and forced a re-fetch.