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How useful would the algorithm being open source be without things like the ML models that feed its parameters or the data used to train the models? It would be
by monkeybutton 5y ago
How useful would the algorithm being open source be without things like the ML models that feed its parameters or the data used to train the models? It would be like knowing PageRank without any of the data and asking why one site is ranked above another in search results.
- zo1 5y agoWe don't need to know the details of the algorithm or the models when we can see how it behaves. E.g. the example of one of the other posters where they cite that IG keeps pushing bikini pics over other content. Just knowing that the above anecdote is true empirically via whatever means is super useful and can shape our understanding and push back.
- lamp987 5y agoIts more about knowing whether the algorithm isnt politically rigged to engineer public opinion by amplifying certain truths and decreasing visibility of other truths.
- monkeybutton 5y agoSince I don't have any insight into their algorithm I'm going to use a naive hypothetical example: Say they did have a system to downrank negative/harmful/spammy content and it works by applying some kind of embedding model to posts and comparing their cosine similarity to a dictionary of known bad content. You have the code, but neither the trained model for doing embeddings nor the set of "bad" vectors. Can you answer the question: Is it politically rigged? That's why I tend to be in agreement with the idea of treating it as a black box and observing what biases it exhibits.