Benefits which MNCs are
getting from AI/ML
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the most significant technological developments in recent history. Few fields promise to “disrupt” (to borrow a favored term) life as we know it quite like machine learning, but many of the applications of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence technology go unseen.
Pinterest
Whether you’re a hardcore pinner or have never used the site before, Pinterest occupies a curious place in the social media ecosystem. Since Pinterest’s primary function is to curate existing content, it makes sense that investing in technologies that can make this process more effective would be a priority — and that’s definitely the case at Pinterest.
In 2015, Pinterest acquired Kosei, a machine learning company that specialized in the commercial applications of machine learning tech (specifically, content discovery and recommendation algorithms).
Today, machine learning touches virtually every aspect of Pinterest’s business operations, from spam moderation and content discovery to advertising monetization and reducing churn of email newsletter subscribers. Pretty cool.
Facebook
Although Facebook’s Messenger service is still a little…contentious (people have very strong feelings about messaging apps, it seems), it’s one of the most exciting aspects of the world’s largest social media platform. That’s because Messenger has become something of an experimental testing laboratory for chatbots.
Some chat bots are virtually indistinguishable from humans when
conversing via text
Any developer can create and submit a chat bot for inclusion in Facebook Messenger. This means that companies with a strong emphasis on customer service and retention can leverage chat bots, even if they’re a tiny startup with limited engineering resources.
Of course, that’s not the only application of machine learning that Facebook is interested in. AI applications are being used at Facebook to filter out spam and poor-quality content, and the company is also researching computer vision algorithms that can “read” images to visually impaired people.
Twitter
Twitter has been at the center of numerous controversies of late (not least of which were the much-derided decisions to round out everyone’s avatars and changes to the way people are tagged in @ replies), but one of the more contentious changes we’ve seen on Twitter was the move toward an algorithmic feed.
Rob Lowe was particularly upset by the introduction of
algorithmically curated Twitter timelines
Whether you prefer to have Twitter show you “the best tweets first” (whatever that means) or as a reasonably chronological timeline, these changes are being driven by Twitter’s machine learning technology. Twitter’s AI evaluates each tweet in real time and “scores” them according to various metrics.
Ultimately, Twitter’s algorithms then display tweets that are likely to drive the most engagement. This is determined on an individual basis; Twitter’s machine learning tech makes those decisions based on your individual preferences, resulting in the algorithmically curated feeds, which kind of suck if we’re being completely honest. (Does anybody actually prefer the algorithmic feed? Tell me why in the comments, you lovely weirdos.)
The Future of Machine Learning
One of the main problems with rapid technological advancement is that, for whatever reason, we end up taking these leaps for granted. Some of the applications of machine learning listed above would have been almost unthinkable as recently as a decade ago, and yet the pace at which scientists and researchers are advancing is nothing short of amazing.
