Meta to leverage AI for improved functionalities

Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced plans to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) for improved functionalities.

The company said it is working on a lot of different technologies, from virtual reality to designing its own data centres, adding that the focus is on foundational technologies that can make entirely new things possible.

Meta, which disclosed this at its Inside Lab event, said the plan is to derive huge benefits from the most important foundational technology of “our time, Artificial Intelligence.”

According to the American firm, Meta’s AI labs are already making these breakthroughs, as part of a long-term effort to create foundational technologies to enable the next era of computing.

“We are showcasing some of this work, such as our Builder Bot demo, which enables people to generate or import things into a virtual world just by using voice commands. And we’re announcing new research advances and sharing more about where we see progress heading in 2022 and beyond,” it stated.

According to the firm, it will drive inclusion through the power of speech and translation. It explained that it is working to create a single system capable of translating between all written languages, breaking down barriers for nearly half the world’s population, who can’t access the Internet in their preferred or native language currently.

The company said that although commonly spoken languages like English, Mandarin, and Spanish are well catered to by current translation tools, roughly 20 per cent of the world’s population do not speak languages covered by these systems. It noted that often, these under-served languages do not have easily accessible corpuses of written text that are needed to train AI systems or sometimes have no standardized writing system at all.

Meta said it wants to overcome these challenges by deploying new machine learning techniques in two specific areas. The first focus, dubbed No Language Left Behind, will concentrate on building AI models that can learn to translate language using fewer training examples. The second, Universal Speech Translator, will aim to build systems that directly translate speech in real-time from one language to another without the need for a written component to serve as an intermediary (a common technique for many translation apps).

Commenting, founder, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, said “the kinds of experiences you’ll have in the metaverse are beyond what’s possible today. It’s an immersive version of the Internet — instead of just looking at something on a screen, you actually feel like you’re inside it or right there present with another person. That’s going to require advances across a whole range of areas, from new hardware devices to software for building and exploring worlds. And the key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI.”

Zukerberg said Today, a lot of AI research is focused on understanding the physical world, but in the metaverse, “we’re going to need AI that is built around helping people navigate virtual worlds as well as our physical world with augmented reality. And because these worlds will be dynamic and always changing, AI is going to need to be able to understand context, and learn the way humans do.”