FACEBOOK'S BEAUTIFUL MIND Tribune Content Agency

In June, Facebook unveiled a new technology with a remarkable ability: DeepText, an artificial-intelligence engine that can understand "with near-human accuracy," according to its engineers, the content in thousands of posts per second–in more than 20 different languages. The program, which promises to grow increasingly adept at grasping the subtleties of human communication, has profound implications for how Facebook serves up content, products, and services to its more than 1.65 billion active monthly users. On Facebook's Messenger app, DeepText can anticipate when someone needs a car and serve up a link to Uber; on the site's News Feed, it can analyze a person's interests to surface the most relevant stories and comments. Ultimately, it can help Facebook create a more personalized and seamless user experience. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a June post about his company's AI investments, "One of our long-term initiatives is to build a new generation of Internet services that are more intuitive and can more easily connect you with the things you care about by understanding the meaning of voice, text, images, videos, and other information."