An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a WSJ report: AI algorithms are inherently black boxes whose workings can be next to impossible to understand — even by many Facebook engineers. “If you look at all the engineers at Facebook, more than one in four are users of our AI platform,” says Mr. Candela. “But more than 70% [of those] aren’t experts.” How so many Facebook engineers can use its AI algorithms without necessarily knowing how to build them, Mr. Joaquin Candela, Facebook’s head of applied machine learning says, is that the system is “a very modular layered cake where you can plug in at any level you want.” He adds, “The power of this is just hard to describe.” Pieces of that platform are performing all kinds of “domain-specific” tasks across Facebook’s properties, from translation to speech recognition.

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook Runs On AI – But 70% of Its Engineers Who Use AI Aren’t Experts