11/3/2018 Facebook Releases Horizon AI Tools for Reinforcement Learning | Fortune

You Can Now Use Facebook's AI Brains to Build the Next Addictive App

By JONATHAN VANIAN November 1, 2018

Facebook is making some of the arti cial intelligence it uses to prod people to
chat and post more available for free.

People can now use the social networking giant’s Horizon coding tools to
create their own software that can learn to do tasks in the most ef cient way
possible by trial-and-error. An outside developer working in her garage, for
example, could use the sophisticated technology to build the next addictive
app.

“A hobbyist or high school student can run it on their laptop or you can run it
on thousands of machines in the cloud,” said Jason Gauci, Facebook’s lead
engineer for Horizon.

Facebook, which announced the availability of the tool on Thursday, has used
the technology to teach its computers to gure out which noti cations users
are most likely to respond to. For instance, a user may click on a noti cation
telling him that his mom liked his latest post about gardening and then
comment back. That same user, however, is less likely to correspond with the
dozens of others who liked his post and whom he barely interacts with on the
service.

The Horizon tools are based on a subset of arti cial intelligence technologies
called reinforcement learning, which companies like Google are also
researching and implementing. Google, for its part, has used reinforcement
learning in its data centers so that its computers learned to adjust its cooling
systems to cut down on power use.

Gauci said that his company also uses reinforcement learning to decide
whether to send people low or high quality videos depending on variables, like
people’s cellular connections, whether they are on a subway, or if they have
just exited a tunnel.

http://fortune.com/2018/11/01/facebook-horizon-artificial-intelligence/?utm_campaign=fortunemagazine&xid=soc_socialflow_facebook_FORTUNE… 1/3
11/3/2018 Facebook Releases Horizon AI Tools for Reinforcement Learning | Fortune

Facebook’s use of reinforcement learning highlights how technology giants are

increasingly using AI technologies that were once only in the domain of
research labs. Google researchers, for example, used reinforcement learning to
teach computers how to master the ancient Chinese board game Go without
direct human help.

While these tech companies use the AI technique of deep learning to teach
computers to automatically recognize images like cats in photos, they use
reinforcement learning to teach computers to automatically perform speci c
actions.

To ensure that computers perform the best possible actions, they are either
rewarded or penalized based on the action’s outcome. In the case of Facebook
noti cations, staff members rewarded the computers each time their alerts led
to people interacting with other users, and penalized the systems when the
alerts caused no response. Over time, the computers learned to send the right
noti cations that would provoke people to comment instead of merely clicking
the alert.

The goal of releasing an open source, or free, version of the Horizon tools is to
spur more coders to experiment with cutting-edge technologies, Gauci said.

Companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others are increasingly

releasing their internal AI tools for free to familiarize developers with their
technology and thereby help with recruiting top talent. Also, by releasing more
AI tools, the companies are trying to win the public relations war over who has
the most sophisticated technology.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.

Of course, implementing powerful automation technology in consumer

products has potential drawbacks. For instance, Facebook, already under re
for spreading fake news and misleading content during the 2016 U.S.
presidential campaign, would dig a deeper hole for itself if its computers
highlighted noti cations from people who routinely post offensive or
controversial content merely because users are more likely to respond to them.

Gauci said that Facebook continuously tests its AI before implementing it, and
that the company’s policy and noti cations teams are also observing the
system, implying that there should be little problems.
http://fortune.com/2018/11/01/facebook-horizon-artificial-intelligence/?utm_campaign=fortunemagazine&xid=soc_socialflow_facebook_FORTUNE… 2/3
11/3/2018 Facebook Releases Horizon AI Tools for Reinforcement Learning | Fortune

http://fortune.com/2018/11/01/facebook-horizon-artificial-intelligence/?utm_campaign=fortunemagazine&xid=soc_socialflow_facebook_FORTUNE… 3/3