Twitter is hiring experts in the field of artificial intelligence for his new created group "Cortex". The experts in the team will focus their efforts on developing AI for understanding content.
From Twitter's job postings we can better understand the nature of their project. The new AI group Cortex is aimed to help the social media network to compete with Facebook and Google in the AI escalating race and to provide a better personalised service for its 300 million users.
The company is hiring system, architecture and software engineers for the new created AI group. The team will work on a specialized branch of artificial intelligence called "Deep Learning". Nowadays, this field of study within AI is very trendy among internet companies.
Twitter's job postings are for positions based in New York. Last year Twitter acquired the AI startup Madbits. According to the job listings, the focus of the group Cortex will be on understanding automatic content. Twitter will build the "backbone" of its learning systems that will be able to label automatically the food of disparate content published by users on its social network.
Since Twitter provides real-time information, there are many opportunities for applying automatic content understanding. The volume of Twitter's content is ever-growing. The format of Twitter's content is diverse: tweets, hyperlinks, music, videos, photos, follow graph and more. The content and the distribution of topics are ever-changing, on hourly, daily or weekly basis. All these factors are making the task of continuously and automatically expose relevant content very challenging, while manually defining features is starting to show its limitations.
The Twitter Cortex aims to build the content representation layer. The role of architecture engineers working in the Twitter Cortex team will be to develop way of building, maintaining and scaling the backbone of Twitter's online learning systems. It sounds exciting, since this means having a direct impact on the lives of million users.
Many internet companies are increasingly focusing their efforts on developing AI. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook's founder and CEO, declared recently that AI is one of the key initiatives of his company. The other social media giant, Google, acquired last year the company DeepMind and is currently involved in artificial neural network projects.
Even though Twitter may not dispose of same resources as Facebook and Google, the recent creation of the Cortex group give us hints that they take artificial intelligence very seriously too. For Twitter, new AI capabilities could revive its service's stalling user grow by attracting more subscribers with new products and services.
Twitter directed its AI initial efforts to detect potentially harmful or inadequate content such as porn. The AI systems helped Twitter to label various types of content at a lower cost and faster than by using humans for the task. Now, by creating a broader AI operation, Twitter will be able to use artificial intelligence systems for better matching users with relevant people and tweets to follow. Cortex is also used for company's advertising system.
