 "Facebook to expirement with AI in new lab")
When we think of Facebook, the first few things that come to our mind in no particular order are cats, memes, couple pictures and BitStrip cartoons. However, the one thing that does not come to our mind is artificial intelligence.
Facebook has announced that it has formed a whole new AI Group which will be led by New York University professor, Yann LeCun. Facebook plans to expand its research lab dedicated to AI with this move. In a Facebook post, LeCun announced his association with the social networking website.
Dabbling in AI (Image credit: Reuters)
“Facebook has created a new research laboratory with the ambitious, long-term goal of bringing about major advances in Artificial Intelligence,” he wrote. “I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted the position of director of this new lab.” LeCun said that he will remain a part time professor at the New York University andl maintain research and teaching activities there.
The newly appointed director of the AI Group says that the long term goal of the lab is to bring about “major advances in Artificial Intelligence”. He added that Facebook and NYU’s Center for Data Science was entering into a partnership to carry out research in data science, machine learning and AI.
Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is also expected to announce and talk more about the AI Group in his presentation at a conference for Neural Information Processing Systems. When VentureBeat tried to talk to Facebook about this new project, it was pointed to excerpts from a statement Zuckerberg made during the company’s earning calls earlier this year.
“The goal here is to use new approaches in AI to help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights about the world to answer people’s questions. We started assembling a team of some of the best people in the field to work on these problems… Over time, I think it’s going to be possible to build services that are much more natural to interact with and can help solve many more problems than any existing technology today,” he had said.
Facebook could use this AI push to improve the quality of its pre-existing products as well as add some more to its portfolio. Right from improving the News Feed’s algorithm to photos, videos and facial recognition at Facebook, this Deep Learning could help the social networking website engross users better.
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