I've been to a couple of Instagram ML meetups. I am not surprised that this is what they came up with. There seemed to be a lot of technically gifted people the

I've been to a couple of Instagram ML meetups. I am not surprised that this is what they came up with. There seemed to be a lot of technically gifted people there, but I always felt there was a lack of creativity and deep domain understanding. All the projects seemed to be in the line of: we added this feature, and we saw our user engagement increased by this percentage. Everyone seemed to be working on incremental improvements without a purposeful leadership and vision. They do have the technical talents though. I think one of the word2vec authors was there, but he was giving a talk about using the same technique on emoji icons :-( I would think there are more interesting problems to tackle with the available resources at FB.