General Intelligence
Facebook Scraped 1 Billion Pictures From Instagram to Train Its A.I. — But Spared European Users
The team purposely excluded Instagram images from the European Union, likely because of GDPR
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
Facebook researchers announced a breakthrough yesterday: They have trained a “self-supervised” algorithm using 1 billion Instagram images, proving that the algorithm doesn’t need human-labeled images to learn to accurately recognize objects.
Typically, the most accurate image recognition algorithms require humans to label images as containing dogs, horses, people, or any other subject, and then the algorithm can find similarities between images humans have indicated contain the same objects. Facebook’s chief A.I. scientist Yann LeCun has been on a mission to change A.I.’s reliance on labels for decades, calling it the “holy grail” of A.I.
But Facebook didn’t just select any billion Instagram images to train the algorithm. The team purposely excluded Instagram images from the European Union, noting in its paper that images were “random, public, and non-EU images.”…
