The explosion of posts, pictures and videos can leave social media users with information overload. With its latest AI lab in Paris, Facebook is betting machines can snap us out of it and communicate better
It's an age-old adage – give the people what they want – and Facebook thinks what you want is help to sift through all the text, pictures and videos swamping your news feed to find out more about your nearest and dearest. It's hoping machines are the answer.
Last month, the social media giant opened a new arm of its artificial intelligence (AI) labs in Paris. The European base will add to the two other AI labs in Menlo Park, California, and New York that the social media giant established a year ago.
Facebook AI Research, or FAIR, looks into machine learning when it comes to image and speech recognition. Its team of some 40 researchers across the three locations are trying to find ways for AI to use networks of neurons – much like the human brain – to recognise voice and photos.
FAIR also delves into more complex machine intelligence, in the hope of developing technology that can pick out and understand strings of text (sentences, rather than just words) – what the boffins call natural language processing – and ultimately answer questions.
All this is for the benefit of humans, according to Facebook. With computers doing the drudge work, that leaves people free to look at and share what is useful for them, and communicate with each other better with the aid of technology. Whatever comes out of FAIR's labs, Facebook hopes the humans will 'Like' it.
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