Facebook is using your Instagram hashtags to teach its AI image recognition

During the opening F8 2018 keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off the company's latest Instagram updates: Spotify integration, AI-based anti-bullying comment filters, AR camera effects and four-way video chat. During the Day 2 keynote, Facebook revealed how your daily Instagram updates are giving its AI technology a deep-learning crash course in image recognition--one that's apparently made its AI even smarter than Google's at categorizing objects in photos. Facebook pulled this off, amazingly enough, by instructing its AI to read photo hashtags and interpret photos' subject matter. Using this strategy, called "weakly supervised training", Facebook's AI achieved a record 85.4% accuracy rating on an industry-wide test of image recognition, beating out Google's previous record. A Facebook Engineering blog post went into detail on the methods.