Download Facebook’s AI tools

FACEBOOK will allow anyone to freely download and use the same artificial intelligence tools it used to make key improvements to the social network’s video and notification features, as well as its Messenger messaging app.

The software, which Facebook calls Horizon, is now available on the code repository GitHub, the company said in a blog post. GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Facebook used this set of tools internally to optimise how 360-degree videos are displayed on the social network, taking into account such factors as the available bandwidth and how much of the video has already been buffered. The same tools, according to the blog post, were also used to improve what content to push to users through notifications.

The Horizon software is focused on reinforcement learning, in which software improves itself by trial-and-error from experience to maximise some reward or minimise some loss, rather than from labelled data sets.

Reinforcement learning underlies a number of breakthroughs in AI – most notably the algorithm that beat the world’s top human players at the strategy game Go, as well as the ones that are now competitive with humans in complex multiplayer computer games such as Dota2.

But so far, it’s been used only rarely to address real-world problems – in part because it often isn’t wise or safe to let an algorithm learn by trial and error. And, for many real-world phenomena, there aren’t accurate simulators in which an algorithm can be safely trained. |