Facebook using new advancements to become leader in AI

Facebook has embarked on a mission to become a leader in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) using new advancements. Chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer in a blog post says the new advancements come from Facebook's AI Research (FAIR) team.

A key element is the ability to train computers to identify objects from photos as well as to understand natural language. Further, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg has developed an AI bot that can even play one of the hardest board games Go.

Facebook already has Moments as its standalone app that uses facial recognition technology to let users organise and share their photos with friends. But now, a new development is in the pipeline by the FAIR team which will offer a system that will not only recognise facials but also segments and make distinctions between objects in a particular photo. The new system is claimed to segment images 30% faster and is capable of using 10 times less training data than any previous intelligent systems.

A BBC report says that a beta version of the new system is intelligent enough to spot different dog breads, merely from pictures. Also, it is said to recognise each dog from a collection of photos "almost instantly".

Apart from the new system to recognise photos, Facebook's dedicated team is working on a natural language understanding system called Memory Networks (MemNets). This system combines the company's image recognition technology to let users start asking questions on the basis of photos. There is also a predictive learning technology to enable systems to understand future happenings.

Some AI efforts are also under way to let users play any of their favourite multiplayer games right from computer systems. "We've achieved this by combining the traditional search-based approach — modelling out each possible move as the game progresses — with a pattern-matching system built by our computer vision team," Schroepfer said.

Facebook is set use the new technologies and AI efforts to enhance its market presence. This is in line with the recently showcased virtual assistant M that would compete with Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. Also, this reportedly raises some security concerns.