Everything you wanted to know about Cortex, the new artificial intelligence Twitter group

Twitter is expanding its artificial intelligence efforts by hunting for experts to form a new team called Cortex.

Several recent job advertisements highlight some details about the new Cortex group, which could help the company better personalize its services for 300 million service users and keep up with Google and Facebook in the ever-growing race in the AI ​​industry.

Twitter has recruited system engineers and software architecture experts into its team. It is planned that they will work on “deep learning” - a specialized industry of artificial intelligence (AI), which is now in vogue among Internet companies. Employment announcements indicate that the place of employment is located in New York, where the Madbits AI startup, acquired last year by Twitter, is located.

Apparently, the main goal of Cortex is "automatic understanding of the content." The information attached to the announcement of the open vacancy explains that Twitter is mainly engaged in the construction of the "backbone" of their self-learning systems designed to automatically sort spam or chaotic content that users publish on their social network.

Here's how Twitter explains in the recruitment announcement why the company needs artificial intelligence and how it sees the new Cortex team:

Twitter is a unique source of real-time information that offers amazing opportunities for automatically understanding content. The format of this content is diverse (tweets, photos, videos, music, hyperlinks, popularity graphs, etc.), the frequency of newsletters is constantly changing (weekly, daily, and sometimes every hour), and the volume is constantly increasing. As a result of this, organizing automatic and continuous display of relevant content is very difficult. Manual features that allow you to identify content by distinguishing features are quite limited.

Our Twitter Cortex team is responsible for building the system to correctly present all this information. As engineers for working with software architecture as part of our team, you can help us build, develop and maintain the foundation of our self-learning online systems and thereby have a direct impact on the lives of our users and the success of our business.

The importance of developing the direction of AI is growing for many Internet companies. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 and is now working in the field of artificial neural networks. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted AI as one of the company's key initiatives.

Twitter does not have the resources of Google or Facebook, but the Cortex team is a major AI project for the company. The capabilities of artificial intelligence can help Twitter create powerful new features and products that could revive the sluggish growth in the number of users of the service.

In a report from the latest issue of Wired magazine, Twitter technical director Alex Roetter shared some information regarding the Cortex team. According to Rotter, Twitter’s initial efforts regarding AI developments were aimed at identifying pornography and other inappropriate content on the site. This allowed Twitter to recognize and, if necessary, delete unwanted content faster and with lower financial costs than to hire entire armies of people who would pore over checking the content.

Now Twitter is working on building a more extensive workflow for the development of artificial intelligence technology, thanks to which the company will be able to better select relevant tweets for its users and recommend interesting people for subscription. According to information from Wired, the Cortex team has already focused on the company's advertising system and will eventually analyze the entire “twitter framework”.