Facebook used billions of hashtagged Instagram photos to train its AI

To understand why this is an interesting approach, it helps to know the difference between "fully supervised" and "weakly supervised" training for artificial intelligence systems. Computer visions systems need to be taught to recognize objects. Show them images that are labeled "bear," for example, and they can learn to identify images it thinks are bears in new photos. When researchers use photographs that humans have annotated so that an AI system can learn from them, that's called "fully supervised." The images are clearly labeled so the software can learn from them.