Facebook Inc. is using its @Scale conference today to provide an update on its progress in artificial intelligence research. The social media company is open-sourcing a new "AI reasoning" platform and providing some updates on its research into machine translation. It's part of a broad push to scale up AI workloads, a difficult task given the massive amounts of data needed to train AI models, Srinivas Narayanan (pictured), the lead for Facebook's Applied AI Research, said this morning at the conference in San Jose, California. "Facebook wouldn't be where it is today without AI," Narayanan said. "It's deeply integrated into everything we do."

According to the Financial Times, Facebook is working on producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips for a virtual assistant to be smarter than Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa Facebook is working with Intel, other tech giants and semiconductor makers to make this goal come true. It's goals in developing a more specialized and powerful AI chip is so that a digital assistant will have enough'common sense' to communicate with a human on any subject as well as making it a practical tool in regards to controlling its social network; for instance in the area of monitoring videos and deciding what content should be allowed on its service. Facebook has in the past been known to make its own hardware when necessary and is currently developing its own custom'application-specific integrated circuit' (ASIC) chips which would be a particular kind of transmission protocol designed to specifically work with the company's AI programs. Yann LeCun, Facebook's chief AI scientist and one of the pioneers of modern AI, says there is a need for more specialized AI chips to speed up tasks at lightening speed but with lower power consumption. He says that the company is doing anything and everything it can do in this area especially in monitoring videos flowing through their site in real time but that it will essentially require neural designs which are computer systems modeled on the human brain and nervous system.

Besides leveraging our inherent, voyeuristic tendencies and natural desire to be connected, the social media platform employs sophisticated AI designed to maximize its users' screen time, and keep them coming back again, and again.

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Facebook announced Thursday that it is open-sourcing some of its latest artificial intelligence vision tools. The company is releasing years' worth of research on computer image recognition and understanding. The tools could be used to create experiences for visually impaired users, better image search on the social networking platform, and interpret live videos in real-time. On Thursday, the social networking giant unveiled several new tools to identify, delineate and label objects in an image. The aim is to help accelerate advancement in the field of machine vision as the company expands on people's interest in sharing and interacting with images and video clips.