Skunkworks

A look inside the labs of three Fortune 500 innovators.

- John Patrick Pullen

FACEBOOK

At the Facebook AI Research lab, the online publisher is teaching robots how to learn. It promises to share the results with its friends.

DAISY, A HEXAPOD ROBOT BORN IN Facebook’s new artificial intelligence lab, scuttles across the verdant roof of the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters with a message to deliver: The future belongs to those who teach—and learn.

That concept sits at the center of Facebook’s AI Research lab, a previously unrevealed opensource project that launched in late 2018, even as the company endured repeated black eyes over privacy concerns related to its advertising products. The lab’s purpose is to use robotics as a vehicle for developing better A.I. “Having embodied intelligence is a really important problem because it creates constraints to the kinds of algorithms that you can use,” says Roberto Calandra, one of Facebook’s robotics research scientists. “You need to have algorithms that can be robust, efficient, and applicable in the real world.”

That’s why Daisy’s stroll along a dusty path is so significant. Introducing the A.I. to “noise”—like bumps in the road—not only helps the robot walk better but, more important, also helps Daisy learn how to learn.