Meta is testing a new large language chatbot, Meta AI, on social platforms in parts of India and Africa. The chatbot was introduced in late 2023, and began testing on U.S. WhatApp users in March. The test is expanding to include more territories and the addition of Instagram and Facebook Messenger. India is reported to be Meta’s largest social market, with more than 500 million Facebook and WhatsApp users, and has big implications as the company scales up its AI plans to compete against OpenAI and others. The Meta AI chatbot answers questions and generates photorealistic images. Continue reading Meta Tests Image-Generating Social Chatbot on Its Platforms

In a Threads post last week, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s new frontier is open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI). Meta has united its FAIR and GenAI research teams behind the goal of developing such a platform, which Zuckerberg described as part of the company’s “long-term vision.” “The next generation of services required is building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that will require “advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.” Continue reading Meta Combines Research Units to Develop Open-Source AGI

Meta Platforms continues to make progress on a mission to develop artificial intelligence that can teach itself to learn how the world works. Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has taken a special interest in developing the new model, called Image Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, or I-JEPA, which learns by building an internal representation of the outside world and analyzing image abstracts instead of comparing pixels. The approach allows AI techto learn more like humans do, with their ability to figure out complex tasks and adapt to new situations. Continue reading Meta Develops Computer Vision AI That Learns Like Humans

Sam Altman continues to call for coordinated international regulation of artificial intelligence. The OpenAI co-founder and CEO visited Seoul this past weekend to meet with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who issued a statement saying it is important to act “with a sense of speed” in establishing international standards or face unwanted “side effects.” Altman also virtually delivered a keynote address to Chinese AI researchers at an annual conference hosted by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, calling on China to participate in global rulemaking. Continue reading Altman Calls on China to Participate in Global AI Rulemaking

Respected members of the advanced tech community are going on record opposing the faction calling for a “pause” in large-model artificial intelligence development. Meta Platforms chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and DeepLearning.AI founder and CEO Andrew Ng, formerly at Alphabet where he helped launch Google Brain, were joined this past week by Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in opposing the proposed six-month halt to development of AI models more advanced than OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is said to train on a trillion parameters — more than 500 times that of GPT-3. Continue reading Mixed Reactions to ‘Pause’ on AI Models Larger than GPT-4

We’re not going to lie: the annual “heads up CES” piece on artificial intelligence is a major exercise in hit or miss. This is because technology rarely evolves on an annual time scale, and certainly not advanced technology like AI. Yet, here we are once again. Sure, 2019 was as fruitful as it gets in the AI research community. The raw debate between Neural Networks Extremists (those pushing for an “all neural nets all the time” approach to intelligence) and the Fanatical Symbolists (those advocating a more hybrid approach between knowledge bases, expert systems and neural nets) took an ugly “Mean Girl” turn, with two of the titans of the field (Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun) trading real insults on Twitter just a few days ago.  Continue reading The Human Interface: What We Expect From AI at CES 2020

Humans learn from experience to not “do dumb things,” and Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is trying to create a version of that for robots, saying that systems that learn “models of the world” are our best shot at advancing artificial intelligence. Unlike a rewards/demerits-based reinforcement learning, Facebook’s tack is to instill curiosity, by giving the robot freedom to try new things. With New York University, Facebook also dramatically reduced the number of tries to teach a robotic arm to grasp an object. Continue reading Facebook Turns to Robots to Advance Artificial Intelligence

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) honored three artificial intelligence pioneers with the prestigious Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, often dubbed the Nobel Prize of computing, was launched in 1966 and includes a $1 million prize that the three honorees will share. Doctors Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio helped lay the foundation for the evolution of technologies including facial recognition, digital assistants and self-driving vehicles. Continue reading AI Pioneers Are Honored with the Prestigious Turing Award

To strengthen its AI Research division (FAIR) and focus on robotics, Facebook is adding five highly regarded computer scientists to its Menlo Park, California headquarters, as well as facilities in Pittsburgh, Seattle and London. The new hires include Carnegie Mellon University professors Jessica Hodgins and Abhinav Gupta, who will head a lab focusing on robotics, a newer area for Facebook. University of Washington’s Luke Zettlemoyer, an expert on natural language processing (NLP), will join the Seattle AI research team. Continue reading Facebook Explores Robotics and NLP, Opens More AI Labs

Facebook has used Intel CPUs for many of its artificial intelligence services, but the company is changing course to adapt to the pressing need to better filter live video content. At the Viva Technology industry conference in Paris, Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun stated that the company plans to make its own chips for filtering video content, because more conventional methods suck up too much energy and compute power. Last month, Bloomberg reported that the company is building its own semiconductors. Continue reading Facebook to Develop Live Video Filtering Chips for Faster AI

One year ago, New York startup Entrupy introduced a technology based on a handheld microscope camera and mobile app to spot counterfeit fashion accessories. Since then, the company says it has improved accuracy to 98 percent for handbags from 11 luxury brands, including Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton. The tech has also been tested on CE products. Fashion brands have thus far used holographic tags, microprinting and, more recently, radio beacons woven into fabric to protect their products against counterfeiting. Internet shopping and second-hand retailers have made it more challenging. Continue reading Startup Develops Technology to Identify Counterfeit Products

After being heavily criticized for the spread of fake news during the latest U.S. presidential election, Facebook is now looking at the possibility of using its research in artificial intelligence to gain control over the problem. Facebook has done research in AI since late 2013, when it hired its current director of artificial intelligence Yann LeCun. But the company is moving gingerly into the field, still trying to figure out the pitfalls of AI, and how to introduce it sensibly and responsibly. Continue reading Facebook Considers Artificial Intelligence to Battle Fake News

Yoshua Bengio, a leader in deep learning and professor at the University of Montreal, is opening Element AI, a startup incubator focused on this form of artificial intelligence. The incubator will help develop AI-centric companies coming from both Bengio’s university and nearby McGill University, part of Bengio’s stated goal of creating an “AI ecosystem” in this Canadian city. According to Bengio, Montreal is home to “the biggest concentration in the world” of researchers in the powerful field of deep learning. Continue reading Deep Learning Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Launches AI Incubator

When Tesla released all of its patents to the public in 2014, it jumpstarted the electric car ecosystem while continuing to succeed. Facebook made its data-center architecture available to the masses, still making a tidy $12+ billion in revenue last year. Open source code is now fueling tremendous innovation and digital capabilities. Whereas companies in the past dominated by using licensed software to create monopolies, today’s companies relying on open source code differentiate themselves by the services they offer. Continue reading Open Source Speeds Developments in Artificial Intelligence