Facebook’s machines are learning faster than ever
LONDON: Although Facebook Inc. doesn’t sell robots, its researchers use plenty of them—and the company said its machines are getting a lot smarter, a lot faster.
The social media giant announced in a blog post on Monday that its engineers, working with computer scientists from New York University, have reduced the time it takes to teach a robotic arm how to grasp objects to tens of tries, rather than hundreds or thousands.
It may seem like a tangential development—facebook doesn’t sell robots, after all— but advancements in robotics can lead to improvements in other forms of machine-learning, smartening the software Facebook has begun to use to spot harmful or unfavourable behaviour of users on the social network. The company has been under ever increasing pressure to use AI to police extremist violence, hate speech and misinformation on its platform. The company has said it is making progress, but that systems that can reliably block such content without human intervention are still years away.
“The great thing about robotics is that it takes place in real time, in the real world,” Antoine Bordes, co-managing director of the company’s artificial intelligence research labs, said in an interview last week in Paris. He contrasted this to research that taught AI to master games, such as chess or Go, which can be run at super-human speeds allowing a software agent to learn from playing millions of games against itself in a period of just a few weeks.