The Expedential Gap

When Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer joined the company in 2008, it was about to hit 100 million users – today they serve 2.7 billion. He joins Azeem Azhar to explore how they planned for infrastructure resilience to cope with such explosive growth, and why Facebook has invested so deeply in AI and virtual reality.

They also discuss:

• How Facebook increasingly uses AI systems to moderate content, including hate speech.
• What Facebook is doing to address the need for greater diversity in its workforce and culture.
• Why Facebook has committed to open source platforms such as PyTorch and React.

Further reading:

• “Facebook’s A.I. Whiz Now Faces the Task of Cleaning It Up. Sometimes That Brings Him to Tears.” (New York Times, 2019)
• “Facebook AI can translate directly between any of 100 languages” (New Scientist, 2020)
• “Who controls the conversation – How to deal with free speech on social media” (The Economist 2020)

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