News/Meta
Robots may gain the sense of touch because of Meta’s latest AI breakthrough
Advancing robotic tactile sensing: Meta AI's breakthrough technologies: Meta AI researchers have made significant strides in developing technologies that give robots a sense of touch, potentially revolutionizing their interaction with the physical world. The Sparsh system allows AI to identify pressure, texture, and movement without relying on extensive databases, marking a significant advancement in robotic sensory capabilities. Researchers created Digit 360, a robotic fingertip equipped with GelSight technology, capable of detecting intricate details about objects it touches and applying appropriate pressure. The Plexus system distributes multiple touch sensors across robotic devices, mimicking the human sense of touch and enhancing overall...
read Nov 1, 2024Zuckerberg vows to boost AI content across Facebook
AI-generated content to flood Facebook and Instagram: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to significantly increase the presence of AI-generated content across the company's social media platforms, signaling a major shift in content strategy. During Meta's third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg expressed his intention to introduce "a whole new category of content" that is either generated or summarized by AI, or existing content curated by AI algorithms. The CEO views this move as an exciting development for Facebook, Instagram, and potentially Threads, despite growing concerns about the proliferation of AI-generated content on social media platforms. The rise of AI slop:...
read Nov 1, 2024Meta just made its MobileLLM model and weights open to researchers
Breakthrough in mobile AI: Meta AI has open-sourced MobileLLM, a set of language models optimized for mobile devices, marking a significant advancement in efficient, on-device AI technology. The full weights and code for MobileLLM are now available on Hugging Face, allowing researchers to access and build upon this innovative technology. The release is currently under a Creative Commons 4.0 non-commercial license, limiting its use to research purposes and prohibiting commercial applications. Technical innovations: MobileLLM introduces several key advancements to maximize AI performance on resource-constrained devices. The models employ deep, thin architectures instead of traditional wide designs, focusing on depth to...
read Oct 31, 2024Meta, Microsoft beat earnings expectations on AI push
AI-driven growth in Big Tech: Meta and Microsoft have reported higher-than-expected revenue for the third quarter of 2024, with both companies attributing their success to advancements in artificial intelligence and related services. Key financial results: Meta reported revenue of $40.59 billion, surpassing analysts' predictions of $40.29 billion and representing a 19% year-on-year growth. Microsoft's revenue reached $65.59 billion, exceeding the expected $64.51 billion and showing a 16% increase from the previous year. Google, another tech giant, reported a 15% increase in revenue compared to the previous year, also driven by its cloud division. AI integration and expansion: Meta CEO Mark...
read Oct 31, 2024Meta is releasing new research to advance embodied AI and robotics
Advancing embodied AI: Meta FAIR is making significant strides in robotics research, aiming to develop AI systems that can perceive and interact with their surroundings as effectively as humans. Meta is releasing several new research artifacts that focus on touch perception, robot dexterity, and human-robot interaction, which are crucial for achieving advanced machine intelligence (AMI). The company is partnering with GelSight Inc and Wonik Robotics to develop and commercialize tactile sensing innovations, fostering an open ecosystem for AI research. Breakthrough in touch perception: Meta Sparsh, a new general-purpose touch representation, is being released to enable AI to perceive what's inaccessible...
read Oct 31, 2024AI search competition intensifies as tech giants vie for dominance
AI search revolution: Meta is developing its own AI search engine to integrate with its Meta AI tool, signaling a shift away from traditional search engines like Google and Bing. The new AI search engine aims to replace current search operations within Meta AI that rely on Google and Bing. This move aligns with the broader trend of transitioning from conventional search engines to more intelligent AI-powered tools. Meta's initiative reflects the growing importance of AI-driven search capabilities in the tech industry. Enhanced user experience: Meta AI's new search functionality is designed to offer more advanced and tailored search results,...
read Oct 31, 2024Meta urges government adoption of its AI technology
Meta's AI ambitions expand to government sector: Mark Zuckerberg revealed Meta is collaborating with the US government to adopt its Llama AI model, raising questions about the scope and implications of this partnership. During Meta's Q3 earnings call, Zuckerberg announced the company is working with the public sector to implement Llama across various government agencies. The announcement lacks specific details about which government departments will use Llama or the intended applications of the AI model. Meta's spokesperson declined to provide additional information beyond Zuckerberg's brief statement to investors. Timing and political context: The push for government adoption of Meta's AI...
read Oct 31, 2024Meta’s AI spending spree surprises even Zuckerberg
Meta's aggressive AI infrastructure expansion: Mark Zuckerberg expresses surprise at the rapid pace of Meta's data center and computing infrastructure buildout for artificial intelligence projects, highlighting the company's ability to exceed initial expectations. Meta has raised the low end of its capital expenditures guidance for 2024 to $38 billion from $37 billion, with the high end remaining at $40 billion. The company anticipates significant growth in expenditures for 2025, including substantial purchases of Nvidia's graphics processing units. Zuckerberg views the rapid execution positively, stating it makes him "somewhat more optimistic" about maintaining a good pace in infrastructure development. Financial implications...
read Oct 31, 2024Meta is training its next Llama AI model on a record-breaking GPU cluster
Meta's AI ambitions accelerate: Meta is developing Llama 4, its next-generation AI model, using a massive GPU cluster that surpasses the computing power of its competitors. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Llama 4 is being trained on a cluster of more than 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which he claims is "bigger than anything" reported by other companies. The initial launch of Llama 4 is expected in early 2024, with smaller models likely to be ready first. Zuckerberg hinted at potential advanced capabilities for Llama 4, including "new modalities," "stronger reasoning," and improved speed. The race for AI dominance: Meta's approach...
read Oct 30, 2024Meta’s Q3 profit jumps 35% on strong ad sales and AI focus
Meta's robust Q3 performance: Meta Platforms Inc. reported strong third-quarter results for 2023, surpassing market expectations with significant growth in both earnings and revenue. Meta's earnings reached $15.69 billion, or $6.03 per share, marking a 35% increase from $11.58 billion, or $4.39 per share, in the same quarter of the previous year. Revenue climbed 19% to $40.59 billion, up from $34.15 billion in Q3 2022. These results exceeded analyst projections, which had anticipated earnings of $5.22 per share on revenue of $40.21 billion. Driving factors behind growth: The company's strong performance was primarily attributed to increased advertising revenue and its...
read Oct 29, 2024Why Meta is positioned to be the biggest beneficiary of AI
Meta's AI potential: A game-changer for digital advertising and content: Meta's strategic position in the tech industry, combined with its vast user base and data resources, positions the company to potentially become the world's most valuable enterprise through its leveraging of generative AI technologies. Meta's existing strengths in automated, data-driven advertising provide a solid foundation for integrating generative AI, potentially revolutionizing the creation of personalized ads at scale and improving targeting precision. The company's extensive network of small advertisers gives it a unique advantage, as these businesses can more readily adopt and benefit from AI-generated creative content compared to larger...
read Oct 28, 2024Meta reportedly building an AI-powered search engine
Meta's strategic shift towards AI independence: Meta is reportedly developing its own search engine to reduce reliance on Google and Microsoft Bing for powering its AI capabilities, particularly in providing news, sports, and stock information. The initiative, led by senior engineering manager Xueyuan Su, has been quietly advancing Meta's web-crawling and indexing technologies over the past year. The company aims to enable Meta AI to deliver live, conversational answers independently, without depending on external search platforms. Meta has partnered with Reuters to enhance its AI's responses to topical queries, further expanding its capabilities. Driving forces behind the move: CEO Mark...
read Oct 26, 2024Meta releases ‘quantized models’ to efficiently run AI on mobile devices
Quantized Llama models: A leap forward in mobile AI: Meta has released lightweight quantized versions of their Llama 3.2 1B and 3B language models, designed to run efficiently on popular mobile devices while maintaining high performance and accuracy. Key advancements in model efficiency: The quantized models achieve a 2-4x speedup compared to their original counterparts. Model size has been reduced by an average of 56%. Memory usage has decreased by an average of 41%. These improvements enable on-device AI capabilities with enhanced privacy and speed. Quantization techniques employed: Quantization-Aware Training with LoRA adaptors (QLoRA): This method prioritizes accuracy by simulating...
read Oct 26, 2024Reuters partners with Meta for AI content collaboration
Meta's groundbreaking AI news deal: Meta has entered into a multi-year agreement with Reuters, allowing the tech giant to use Reuters content for its AI chatbot responses, marking Meta's first major AI deal for news content. The partnership will enable Meta AI to respond to news-related questions with summaries and links to Reuters content, enhancing the chatbot's ability to provide current event information. This deal represents a significant shift in Meta's approach to news content, particularly in light of its previous stance on news on platforms like Threads. The agreement is set to launch for US users on Friday, with...
read Oct 25, 2024Meta beats Apple and Google in the race to put powerful AI on mobile devices
AI comes to your pocket: Meta's breakthrough in mobile AI technology: Meta Platforms has developed compressed versions of its Llama artificial intelligence models that can run efficiently on smartphones and tablets, potentially revolutionizing how we interact with AI in our daily lives. Technological innovation driving mobile AI: Meta's achievement in compressing large language models for mobile devices represents a significant leap forward in AI accessibility and functionality. The company has created smaller versions of its Llama 3.2 1B and 3B models that run up to four times faster while using less than half the memory of earlier versions. These compressed...
read Oct 23, 2024How this online gifting site protects customer privacy with Meta’s AI tools
Innovative privacy protection in AI-driven gift recommendations: Untukmu.AI, an Indonesian personalized gift recommendation platform, has developed a unique approach to safeguarding customer data privacy using Llama on edge devices. The company has created a semi-decentralized personal assistant that prevents direct access to customer data while still providing personalized recommendations. This innovative solution addresses growing concerns about data privacy and the protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the post-cookie era. Technical implementation of split inference: Untukmu.AI's Senior ML Engineer, Puja Romulus, devised a split inference approach to balance privacy concerns with computational feasibility. Customer data is stored only on edge...
read Oct 20, 2024Meta, Berkeley, NYC team up to endow AI models with the power of thought
AI-powered thought optimization: A new approach to improving generative AI and large language models (LLMs) focuses on enhancing their reasoning capabilities through a process akin to human metacognition. Researchers from Meta, UC Berkeley, and NYU have developed a technique called Thought Preference Optimization (TPO) to improve AI's logical reasoning across various domains. The method involves prompting LLMs to generate thoughts before producing responses, then using a judge model to evaluate and optimize these thought processes. This approach addresses the challenge of training AI to "think" despite the lack of readily available supervised training data on human thought processes. The importance...
read Oct 19, 2024WhatsApp’s AI may soon start to remember your preferences
Meta AI's Personalization Upgrade: WhatsApp's AI chatbot is set to receive a significant enhancement with the introduction of a new Memory feature, allowing for more tailored and relevant user interactions. The upcoming Memory feature will enable Meta AI to remember and utilize information shared by users during conversations, such as food preferences, birthdays, and personal interests. This development aims to provide more personalized and contextually appropriate responses in future interactions. Feature Details and User Control: The Memory feature is designed to balance personalization with user privacy and control. A new Memory section will be added to the Meta AI contact...
read Oct 19, 2024Meta just released Spirit LM, an open-source multimodal AI model
Introducing Meta Spirit LM: Meta has unveiled a groundbreaking open-source multimodal language model that seamlessly integrates text and speech inputs and outputs, challenging competitors like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Hume's EVI 2. Developed by Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, Spirit LM aims to address limitations in existing AI voice experiences by offering more expressive and natural-sounding speech generation. The model is capable of learning tasks across modalities, including automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and speech classification. Currently, Spirit LM is only available for non-commercial usage under Meta's FAIR Noncommercial Research License. Advanced approach to text and speech processing: Spirit...
read Oct 18, 2024Renowned horror film studio teams with Meta to leverage AI video tech
AI in Hollywood: Blumhouse Productions Partners with Meta for Movie Gen Access: Blumhouse Productions, the renowned horror film studio, has entered into a partnership with Meta to utilize an early version of their AI video generation model, Movie Gen, sparking discussions about the role of artificial intelligence in filmmaking. Industry collaboration and technology exploration: Blumhouse Productions, known for franchises like "Halloween" and "The Purge," is taking steps to incorporate AI technology into its creative process through a partnership with Meta. The collaboration grants Blumhouse access to an early version of Meta's recently unveiled AI video generation model, Movie Gen. Jason...
read Oct 18, 2024Meta shares massive AI materials database to accelerate research
Meta's game-changing contribution to materials science AI: Meta has released a massive open-source data set and AI models called Open Materials 2024 (OMat24) to accelerate the discovery of new materials using artificial intelligence. The big picture: The OMat24 release addresses a critical bottleneck in materials discovery by providing researchers with an extensive, high-quality data set and AI models that were previously unavailable or proprietary. Meta's decision to make OMat24 freely available and open-source stands in contrast to other industry players like Google and Microsoft, who have kept their competitive models and data sets secret. The data set contains approximately 110...
read Oct 17, 2024Meta unveils open-source AI hardware strategy
The evolution of Meta's AI infrastructure: Meta's journey in scaling its AI capabilities has led to significant advancements in hardware design and infrastructure optimization to support increasingly complex AI models and workloads. Meta has been integrating AI into its core products for years, including features like Feed and its advertising system. The company's latest AI model, Llama 3.1 405B, boasts 405 billion parameters and required training across more than 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Meta's AI training clusters have rapidly scaled from 128 GPUs to two 24,000-GPU clusters in just over a year, with expectations for continued growth. Networking challenges and...
read Oct 15, 2024Missed the Northern Lights? Meta suggests fabricating images instead
AI-generated image controversy: Meta has sparked outrage on its Threads platform by suggesting users create fake Northern Lights photos using Meta AI, highlighting growing concerns about misinformation and the ethical use of AI image generators. Meta's Threads post, titled "POV: you missed the northern lights IRL, so you made your own with Meta AI," showcased AI-generated images of the Northern Lights over famous landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and Las Vegas. The post received significant backlash from users, with some criticizing Meta's apparent disregard for authentic photography and others expressing concern about the potential for spreading misinformation. Ethical implications...
read Oct 13, 2024Meta AI chief Yann LeCun says existential risk of AI is ‘complete BS’
AI safety concerns challenged: Yann LeCun, Meta's AI Chief and renowned AI scientist, has dismissed predictions about artificial intelligence posing an existential threat to humanity as unfounded. LeCun, a decorated AI researcher and New York University professor, won the prestigious A.M. Turing award for his groundbreaking work in deep learning. In response to questions about AI becoming smart enough to endanger humanity, LeCun bluntly stated, "You're going to have to pardon my French, but that's complete B.S." This stance puts LeCun at odds with other prominent tech figures like OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who have expressed concerns about...
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