A person who uses Instagram.
Lorenzo Di Cola | NurPhoto via Getty Images
Pugs, ferraris, mountains, breakfasts, beaches and babies: Instagram is full of them. In fact, it has become one of the largest image databases on the planet over the past decade, and the company’s owner, Facebook, uses this treasure to show machines what’s in the photo.
Facebook announced Thursday that it had built an artificial intelligence program that can “see” what it’s looking at. It did so by feeding it more than 1 billion public Instagram images.
The “computer vision” program, nicknamed SEER, surpassed existing AI models in an object recognition test, Facebook said.
He achieved a “classification accuracy score” of 84.2% when he tested a test provided by ImageNet, which is a large visual database designed for use in visual object recognition software research. It basically tests whether an artificial intelligence program can identify what’s in the photo.
New approach
While many AI models are formed in carefully tagged datasets, Facebook said SEER learned to identify objects in photos by analyzing random, unlabeled, and untreated Instagram images. This artificial intelligence technique is known as self-controlled learning (SEER is a SElf-SUPERvised play).
“The future of artificial intelligence is to create systems that can learn directly from the information given to them, whether text, images or other data, without relying on carefully curated and labeled data sets to teach. -they recognize objects in a photo, interpret a block of text or perform any of the countless tasks we ask of them, “Facebook researchers wrote in a blog post.
“SEER’s performance demonstrates that self-controlled learning can excel in computer vision tasks in real-world environments,” they added. “This is a breakthrough that ultimately paves the way for more flexible, accurate, and adaptable computer vision models in the future.”
Although it is only a research project, a Facebook spokesman said the potential uses were relatively broad. They include automatically generated enhanced text to describe images to the visually impaired, better automatic ranking of items sold on the Facebook Marketplace, and better systems to keep harmful images away from the Facebook platform, the company said.
Privacy issue?
But many Instagram users may be surprised to learn that their images are used to form Facebook’s artificial intelligence systems.
“We inform Instagram account holders in our data policy that we use the information we have to support research and innovation, including technological advances like this,” Priya Goyal, software engineer at CNBC, told CNBC. Facebook AI Research.
Facebook said it will open up some of its software so other researchers can experiment with it.
“While we share the details of our research and create an open source library that will allow other researchers to use self-controlled learning to form models in uncured images, we do not share images or SEER mode,” Goyal said.
Other large technology companies, such as Google and Microsoft, are also trying to push the limits of computer vision. Last summer, Google released the SimCLRv2 computer vision model, while OpenAI released iGPT 2.