Lars Rehm:

At its F8 developers conference Facebook not only revealed a number of new Instagram features, the company also talked about how it is using the billions of images on Instagram to train the world’s most accurate image recognition systems.

Training deep learning models for image and object recognition is typically a very labor-intensive task, as each training image has to be looked at and labeled by human workers. This is a serious limitation to the size of training image databases; however, Facebook has found a way to reduce human supervision in the training process by using images that are already labeled… with Instagram hashtags.