It’s contractors, all the way down.
Facebook has been slowly rolling out its M Messenger virtual assistant to people in California in recent weeks. Think of M as a Siri that can do things for you in the real world: everything from reducing your cable bill to finding you a nearby yoga class.
M is a combination of human beings and AI that work together to complete tasks you send it. The people are meant to be "trainers," showing the AI how to do things. For now, M seems to be largely leaning on human beings for anything beyond very simple Siri-like requests (what's the weather like, please set an alarm for me, etc.). But the grand idea is that over time the humans will do less and less, as the AI becomes more and more autonomous -- more and more human.
Although it's just weeks old, M can already do lots of amazing things, as my colleague Alex Kantrowitz has chronicled. Yet it's also extremely limited right now. Only a relative handful of Facebook's users have it (it launched with "a few hundred" in August and has been slowly expanding since then) all of whom are at least ostensibly in California. Also, it seems like an incredibly ambitious, potentially extremely expensive experiment.
So when M popped up in my list of Messenger contacts, I was eager to probe it and see what it could and couldn't do. I wanted to understand how it worked.
Like: Would it lie to me?
Yes. Yes, M will lie to me.
Could it bring me a puppy?
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment