Everything you wanted to know about Cortex - the new Twitter group on development related to artificial intelligence

Twitter is increasing its strength in the field of artificial intelligence, hunting for experts who will form a new team called Cortex.

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

Twitter attracts system software engineers and software architects to its team. It is planned that they will work on "deep learning" - a specialized branch of artificial intelligence (AI), which is now in vogue among Internet companies. Job advertisements indicate that the workplace is located in New York, where the Madbits AI startup, acquired by Twitter last year, is located.
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Apparently, the main goal of Cortex is "automatic understanding of content." The information attached to the vacancy announcement explains that Twitter is mainly engaged in building the “backbone” of its self-learning systems for automatically sorting spam or the chaotic content that users publish on their social network.

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

Twitter is a unique source of real-time information that offers amazing opportunities to automatically understand the content. The format of this content is varied (tweets, photos, videos, music, hyperlinks, charts of popularity, etc.), the frequency of sending topics is constantly changing (weekly, daily, and sometimes every hour), and the volume is constantly increasing. As a result, organizing automatic and continuous display of relevant content is very difficult. The manual functions allowing to reveal content on distinctive features are quite limited.

Our Twitter Cortex team is responsible for building the system to correctly present all this information. As software engineers as part of our team, you can help us build, develop and maintain the foundation of our self-taught 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 increasing 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 Google or Facebook resources, but the Cortex team is a major AI project for the company. Artificial intelligence capabilities can help Twitter create powerful new features and products that could revive a sluggish growth in the number of service users.

In a report on the latest issue of Wired magazine, Twitter technical director Alex Rotter (Alex Roetter) shared some information regarding the Cortex team. According to Rotter, Twitter’s initial efforts regarding AI development were aimed at identifying pornography and other unwanted material on the site. This allowed Twitter to recognize and, if necessary, remove unwanted content faster and at lower cost, rather than hiring entire armies of people who would bother checking content.

Now Twitter is working to build a more extensive workflow for the development of artificial intelligence technology, thanks to which the company can better select relevant tweets for its users and recommend interesting people to subscribe. According to information from Wired, the Cortex team has already focused its activities around the company's advertising system and, over time, will be engaged in analyzing the entire “twitter basis”.