Forwarding, since the subjects may be of interest to people on the Wikitech, AI, and Research lists.
I'm unqualified to evaluate Damon's comments and the FB exec's comments about AI, so please refrain from shooting the messenger if these aren't helpful or interesting to those of you who do know enough about AI to make well-educated assessments.
Regards,
Pine ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Damon Sicore" damon@sicore.com Date: Aug 18, 2016 21:35 Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Facebook CTO on strategy, Internet access, Wikipedia To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc:
Hi,
I usually don't recommend these things, but this interview with Schrep [1] [2] is interesting and insightful. I recommend listening to it instead of reading. He discusses FB's ten year plan, AI, VR, Internet access for all, mentions Wikipedia several times, confirms their insatiable hunger for structured data, and reveals several details on their innovation approach. Trigger Warning: Corporate Speak
Make no mistake, I've nothing but contempt and spite for Facebook, but having worked with Mike I also know he demonstrates formidable intellect and is a decent person. He's incredibly capable in building amazing teams and predicting (more like sniffing out) the future of tech. I watch his moves closely to stay sharp.
He's right about how papers are coming out constantly which augment current AI tech in interesting new ways. I believe we're living in interesting times for computer science and mathematics--computational linguistics and probabilistic search in particular. A person can't read the CS and math papers fast enough in order to keep up with the innovation. A lot of it is trivial, sure, but some is quite startling in impact as they combine a few smaller things which seemed previously innocuous yet when used together they solve key problems.
When looking into tech and strategy for WMF and the engineers it supports, I'd be very interested in the direction Facebook is going and the technologies they plan on investing in, so passing it along.
Yours faithfully, Damon
[1] http://www.metisstrategy.com/interview/mike-schroepfer/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Schroepfer
Damon Sicore 512 963 5126 https://damon.sicore.com 6E98 FBFB D192 D325 B85D D4FF FD2A 20ED DC1D 3975 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe