The hunt is on at Twitter for engineers to ramp up the company’s artificial intelligence efforts. It calls the new team “Cortex.” After acquiring DeepMind in 2014 Google has been doing a lot of work with artificial neural networks. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has flagged artificial intelligence as one of the company’s key initiatives. So it’s no wonder that Twitter wants to enlist architecture and systems software engineers to work on “Deep Learning”,
Wikipedia tells us that “one of the promises of deep learning is replacing handcrafted features with efficient algorithms for unsupervised or semi-supervised feature learning and hierarchical feature extraction.” Twitter’s Cortex team will mine this specialized branch of artificial intelligence to help the company better personalize its service for its 300 million users, and keep up with Google and Facebook in the industry’s real-time personalization race.
Twitter’s job listing explains why it needs artificial intelligence and how it views the new Cortex team:
“Twitter is a unique source of real-time information, offering amazing opportunities for automatic content understanding. The format of this content is diverse (tweets, photos, videos, music, hyperlinks, follow graph …), the distribution of topics ever-changing (on a weekly, daily, or sometimes hourly basis), and the volume ever-growing; making it very challenging to automatically and continuously expose relevant content. Manually defining features to represent this data is showing its limits.
“Our team, Twitter Cortex, is responsible for building the representation layer for all this content. As an architecture engineer at Twitter Cortex, you will help us build, scale and maintain the backbone of our online learning systems, and directly impact the lives of our users and the success of our business.”
Twitter may not have the resources of Google or Facebook, but the Cortex group demonstrates that Twitter is a serious AI contender. For Twitter, AI capabilities could translate into new products and features and breathe life into stalling user growth. If the flood of content generated on Twitter every hour can by presented as a personalized feed to each user based on their interests then Twitter might just strike gold.
Let us know your thoughts about how artificial intelligence can revolutionize the digital social media world.
