Your Instagram photo of a perfectly composed plate of pancakes or an exquisitely framed sunset is helping Facebook train its artificial intelligence algorithms to better understand objects in images, the company announced today at its annual F8 developer conference. Facebook says the approach, which culls images from publicly available hashtags, is a way to amass and train software with billions of images without the need for human workers to laboriously analyze the data and annotate it. The end result is a training system that created algorithms Facebook says beat top-of-the-line industry benchmarks.

“We rely almost entirely on hand-curated, human-labeled data sets. If a person hasn’t spend the time to label something specific in an…

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