Meta plans AI-driven universal translator
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at an online event Wednesday. Screenshot: Axios
Facebook parent company Meta on Wednesday detailed several research efforts that it insists are key to its project of building a metaverse.
The big picture: While some of the work, like a new type of haptic gloves, is closely tied to virtual reality, a number of the efforts Meta talked about on Wednesday predate the company's metaverse push and have wide use beyond it.
Of note: Meta touted self-supervised machine learning as a key technology to helping create and make sense of a future with many digital worlds.
- Unlike other approaches, AI systems of this type learn the rules of the realm they are trying to understand through observation, rather than based on human classification.
What they're saying: "The road to the metaverse goes through AI," Meta AI research managing director Antoine Bordes told Axios.
- Bordes also said that computer vision systems based on self-supervised AI have the potential to be less biased, since humans aren't adding their own labels to the data.
Among the projects that Facebook touted was a language translation system capable of converting texts directly among 100 languages in real-time without needing to use English as an intermediary step.
- That means being able to solve for 10,000 language-to-language pairings and allowing the technology to go "beyond the populations that have been well served with technology," Bordes said — something that wasn't possible two years ago.
- Overall, Meta says that currently more than 20% of the world's population uses a language not covered by commercial language translation systems. "We don't have to wait for the metaverse to happen to have impact," Bordes said.
Between the lines: Facebook tried to paint its work as a contribution to the broader field of artificial intelligence. The company pledged to be transparent about its research as well as to share some of the code through open source releases.
