Our latest AI advancements represent fundamental building blocks that could power entirely new future shopping experiences.
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Facebook AI is on a quest to build the world’s largest shoppable social media platform, where billions of items can be bought and sold in one place.
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As a key milestone toward this goal, we’re sharing details on how we’ve improved and expanded GrokNet, our breakthrough product recognition system. Now, it’s powering new applications on Facebook, like product tagging and showing visually similar products. Soon, we’ll bring visual search to Instagram so that people find similar products just by tapping on an image.
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We’re also diving into our latest advancements, which provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of product attributes and multimodal signals. These advancements collectively represent fundamental building blocks that could power entirely new shopping innovations of the future.
WHY IT MATTERS: as marketplaces become popular, finding a specific product in a catalog of millions of products will become harder and harder. The holy grail is visual search: snap a picture of something and get some AI to help you find something similar, or that matches well with that. eBay has made tests, Google lens has returned amazing results in my recent experience. Not sure what Amazon is doing but I assume it is top of their list.
Facebook is a major player in this game as it wants to make marketplace the shopping destination (don't forget it owns instagram as well). So the investment in grokNet is critical and recent results appear promising, though not yet perfect.
So if you build a marketplace, as we are for panier bleu, then this is an area of innovation we cannot afford to bypass.