Husband and mike schroepfer

by Mymy · 11.03.2022

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer testified in front of the U.K government’s fake news committee.

husband and mike schroepfer

husband and mike schroepfer

Facebook has heralded artificial intelligence as a solution to its toxic content problems. Mike Schroepfer, its chief technology officer, says it won’t solve everything.

Mr. Schroepfer — or Schrep, as he is known internally — is the person at Facebook leading the efforts to build the automated tools to sort through and erase the millions of such posts. But the task is Sisyphean, he acknowledged over the course of three interviews recently.

That’s because every time Mr. Schroepfer and his more than 150 engineering specialists create A.I. solutions that flag and squelch noxious material, new and dubious posts that the A.I. systems have never seen before pop up — and are thus not caught. The task is made more difficult because “bad activity” is often in the eye of the beholder and humans, let alone machines, cannot agree on what that is.

In one interview, Mr. Schroepfer acknowledged after some prodding that A.I. alone could not cure Facebook’s ills. “I do think there’s an endgame here,” he said. But “I don’t think it’s ‘everything’s solved,’ and we all pack up and go home.”

Mr. Schroepfer, 44, is in a position he never wanted to be in. For years, his job was to help the social network build a top-flight A.I. lab, where the brightest minds could tackle technological challenges like using machines to pick out people’s faces in photos. He and Mr. Zuckerberg wanted

“None of us have ever seen anything like this,” said John Lilly, a former chief executive of Mozilla and now a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, who studied computer science with Mr. Schroepfer at Stanford University in the mid-1990s. “There is no one else to ask about how to solve these problems.”

Facebook allowed us to talk to Mr. Schroepfer because it wanted to show how A.I. is catching troublesome content and, presumably, because it was interested in humanizing its executives. The chief technology officer often shows his feelings, according to many who know him.

But few could have predicted how Mr. Schroepfer would react to our questions. In two of the interviews, he started with an optimistic message that A.I. could be the solution, before becoming emotional. At one point, he said coming to work had sometimes become a struggle. Each time, he d up when discussing the scale of the issues that Facebook was confronting and his responsibilities in changing them.

Mr. Zuckerberg was shoeless. Over the next 30 minutes, the C.E.O. paced back and forth in his socks while keeping up a conversation with Dr. Farabet, an A.I. researcher at New York University. Mr. Zuckerberg described A.I. as “the next big thing” and “the next step for Facebook.” Mr. Schroepfer, seated on the couch, occasionally piped up to reinforce a point.

Mr. Schroepfer and Mr. Zuckerberg wanted to push Facebook into that contest, seeing the rapidly improving technology as something the company needed to jump on. A.I. could help the social network recognize faces in photos and videos posted to its site, Mr. Schroepfer said, and could aid it in better targeting ads, organizing its News Feed and