Facebook's AI Chief Talks AR Glasses, AI, And Machine Learning

Facebook AI Research chief AI scientist Yann LeCun believes augmented reality glasses are an ideal challenge for machine learning (ML) practitioners -- a "killer app" -- because they involve a confluence of unsolved problems. Perfect AR glasses will require the combination of conversational AI, computer vision, and other complex systems capable of operating with a form factor as small as a pair of spectacles. Low-power AI will be necessary to ensure reasonable battery life so users can wear and use the glasses for long periods of time. Alongside companies like Apple, Niantic, and Qualcomm, Facebook this fall confirmed plans to make augmented reality glasses by 2025. "This is a huge challenge for hardware because you might have glasses with cameras that track your vision in real time at variable latency, so when you move … that requires quite a bit of computation. You want to be able to interact with an assistant through voice by talking to it so it listens to you all the time, and it will talk to you as well. You want to have gesture [recognition] so the assistant [can perform] real-time hand tracking," he said.