Data Scientists at Work

CHAPTER 3

Yann LeCun

Facebook

Yann LeCun is the Director of AI Research at Facebook, the world’s largest social networking service. Facebook’s core business is to facilitate communication among people and between people and the digital world. The technology required to support this mission is immense given the sheer scale of data involved. As of 2014, Facebook had over 1.3 billion active users (with more than 150 billion connections among each other) and 829 million unique daily logins. On an average day, these users uploaded around 350 million photos, shared around 4.75 billion items, and sent around 10 billion messages. The availability of these streaming data sets is so large that, for the most part, Facebook’s systems only have time to look ...