Facebook Used Billions of Hashtagged Instagram Photos to Train Its AI
Hashtags are actually useful for training computer vision systems
By Rob Verger
Consider Instagram hashtags. When someone uploads a photograph to the Facebook-owned platform, they can add a hashtag. That could be something like #love, #fashion, or #photooftheday — those were the top three hashtags of last year. While those tags illustrate abstract concepts, there are plenty of more concrete descriptors our there, like #brownbear, which, unsurprisingly, is full of ursine pics.
But while hashtags are a good way for someone to see millions of #travel photos in one place, Facebook used those labeled photographs to do something else: train their image-recognition software, which is a kind of artificial intelligence called computer vision in which you teach a computer to recognize what’s in an image.
In fact, they used some 3.5 billion Instagram photos (from public accounts) and 17,000 hashtags to train a computer vision system that they say is the best one that they have created yet.
Facebook’s CTO, Mike Schroepfer, announced the research today at the company’s developer conference, F8, calling the results “state of the art.”
