‘To machine or not to machine’ is a topic of ongoing debate in the tech industry. However, the conversation heated up again when Heather Bellini, an analyst at Goldman Sachs brought the topic to light at Facebook’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
Bellini referenced the 35,000 people employed by Facebook for safety and questioned the company’s budget in this area during the question-and-answer period.
She asked whether technologies like artificial intelligence could replace human and potentially help the company get more advantage out of their existing budget.
In his response, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO explained that Facebook is leveraging Artificial Intelligence for the tasks that it is good at while humans are serving their purpose in the system for content moderation. He also added that they have so much content flowing in every minute of the day that they do require the assistance of a large group of humans to look into it. He ended his statement by declaring that computers will not substitute the 35,000 people dedicated to online safety by the company.
Chief financial officer of the company also agreed with the CEO and said that humans filtering out content also helps the machine learning algorithms learn the difference between illicit and legible content – which thus enhances its scrutiny process!
Photo: Derick Hudson via Getty Images
Read next: Is Facebook as dangerous as NSA? Yes, says Edward Snowden
Bellini referenced the 35,000 people employed by Facebook for safety and questioned the company’s budget in this area during the question-and-answer period.
She asked whether technologies like artificial intelligence could replace human and potentially help the company get more advantage out of their existing budget.
In his response, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO explained that Facebook is leveraging Artificial Intelligence for the tasks that it is good at while humans are serving their purpose in the system for content moderation. He also added that they have so much content flowing in every minute of the day that they do require the assistance of a large group of humans to look into it. He ended his statement by declaring that computers will not substitute the 35,000 people dedicated to online safety by the company.
Chief financial officer of the company also agreed with the CEO and said that humans filtering out content also helps the machine learning algorithms learn the difference between illicit and legible content – which thus enhances its scrutiny process!
Photo: Derick Hudson via Getty Images
Read next: Is Facebook as dangerous as NSA? Yes, says Edward Snowden
