Facebook announced several new hires of top academics in the field of artificial intelligence, among them a roboticist known for her work at Disney making animated figures move in more human-like ways.
The hires raise a big question — why is Facebook interested in robots, anyway?
It’s not as though the social media giant is suddenly interested in developing mechanical friends, although it does use robotic arms in some of its data centers. The answer is even more central to the problem of how AI systems work today.
Today, most successful AI systems have to be exposed to millions of data points labeled by humans — like, say, photos of cats — before they can learn to recognize patterns that people take for granted. Similarly, game-playing bots like Google’s computerized Go master AlphaGo Zero require tens of thousands of trials to learn the best moves from their failures.
Creating systems that require less data and have more common sense is a key goal for making AI smarter in the future.
“Clearly we’re missing something in terms of how humans can learn so fast,” Yann LeCun, Facebook’s chief AI scientist, said in a call with reporters last week. “So far the best ideas have come out of robotics.”
This story is from the Techlife News #351 edition of Techlife News.
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This story is from the Techlife News #351 edition of Techlife News.
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