Meta’s NLLB-200 AI model improves translation quality by 44%

Meta has unveiled a new AI model called NLLB-200 that can translate 200 languages and improves quality by an average of 44 percent. 

Translation apps have been fairly adept at the most popular languages for some time. Even when they don’t offer a perfect translation, it’s normally close enough for the native speaker to understand.

However, there are hundreds of millions of people in regions with many languages – like Africa and Asia – that still suffer from...

7 July 2022 | Applications

Meta claims its new AI supercomputer will set records

Meta (formerly Facebook) has unveiled an AI supercomputer that it claims will be the world’s fastest.

The supercomputer is called the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) and is yet to be fully complete. However, Meta’s researchers have already begun using it for training large natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZnykn1tDSE

RSC is set to be fully built in mid-2022. Meta says that it will be the fastest in the...

25 January 2022 | Applications

Meta releases PyTorch Live for creating mobile ML demos ‘in minutes’

Meta has announced PyTorch Live, a library of tools designed to make it easy to create on-device mobile ML demos “in minutes”.

PyTorch Live was unveiled during PyTorch Developer Day and enables anyone to build mobile ML demo apps using JavaScript, the world’s most popular programming language.

https://twitter.com/PyTorch/status/1466121890791972869

While on-device AI demos cannot currently be shared, Meta says that functionality is on the way. Developers can...

2 December 2021 | Development

Facebook claims its AI reduced hate by 50% despite internal documents highlighting failures

Damning reports about the ineffectiveness of Facebook’s AI in countering hate speech prompted the firm to publish a post to the contrary, but the company's own internal documents highlight serious failures.

Facebook has had a particularly rough time as of late, with a series of Wall Street Journal reports in particular claiming the company knows that “its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm” and “despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous...

18 October 2021 | Ethics & Society

Social media algorithms are still failing to counter misleading content

As the Afghanistan crisis continues to unfold, it’s clear that social media algorithms are unable to counter enough misleading and/or fake content.

While it’s unreasonable to expect that no disingenuous content will slip through the net, the sheer amount that continues to plague social networks shows that platform-holders still have little grip on the issue.

When content is removed, it should either be prevented from being reuploaded or at least flagged as...

17 August 2021 | Ethics & Society

AR overtakes AI as the ‘most disruptive’ emerging technology

A new report from GlobalData finds that professionals now believe AR will disrupt their industry more than AI.

70 percent of the 2,341 respondents across 30 business sectors picked AR as disrupting their industry most out of a selection of seven emerging technologies: AI, cybersecurity, cloud computing, IoT, blockchain, and 5G.

Filipe Oliveira, Senior Analyst at GlobalData, commented: “This change in how people see AR will likely be long term, and not just a temporary...

28 July 2021 | Apple

Facebook is developing a news-summarising AI called TL;DR

Facebook is developing an AI called TL;DR which summarises news into shorter snippets.

Anyone who’s spent much time on the web will know what TL;DR stands for⁠—but, for everyone else, it’s an acronym for “Too Long, Didn’t Read”.

It’s an understandable sentiment we’ve all felt at some point. People lead busy lives. Some outlets now even specialise in short, at-a-glance news.

The problem is, it’s hard to get the full picture of a story in just...

16 December 2020 | Meta (Facebook)

Facebook uses AI to help people support each other

Facebook has deployed an AI system which matches people needing support with local heroes offering it.“United we stand, divided we fall” is a clichéd saying—but tackling a pandemic is a collective effort. While we’ve all seen people taking selfish actions, they’ve been more than balanced out by those helping to support their communities.

Facebook has been its usual blessing and a curse during the pandemic. On the one hand, it's helped people to stay connected and...

2 October 2020 | Meta (Facebook)

Facebook pledges crackdown on deepfakes ahead of the US presidential election

facebook deepfakes ai usa presidential elections 2020 artificial intelligence social media

Facebook has pledged to crack down on misleading deepfakes ahead of the US presidential election later this year.

Voter manipulation is a concern for any functioning democracy and deepfakes provide a whole new challenge for social media platforms.

A fake video of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, went viral last year after purportedly showing her slurring her words as if she was intoxicated. The clip shows how even a relatively...

8 January 2020 | Meta (Facebook)

Esteemed consortium launch AI natural language processing benchmark

facebook google deepmind nlp consortium ai artificial intelligence natural language processing

A research consortium featuring some of the greatest minds in AI are launching a benchmark to measure natural language processing (NLP) abilities.

The consortium includes Google DeepMind, Facebook AI, New York University, and the University of Washington. Each of the consortium’s members believe a more comprehensive benchmark is needed for NLP than current solutions.

The result is a benchmarking platform called SuperGLUE which replaces an older platform called GLUE...

15 August 2019 | Google