If you could crack open Facebook and see the gears turning under the social network's face, you'd find a surprising amount of artificial intelligence being applied in all sorts of ways. As of today, the company is pulling back the curtain and making Horizon -- the company's end-to-end applied reinforcement learning platform that helps fine-tune that AI -- open source. Reinforcement learning is a commonly used tool in machine learning to teach a wanted behavior. It works by rewarding desirable behaviors while discouraging undesirable ones. Facebook has used Horizon in a number of its applications in an attempt to better serve its users.

Facebook today is announcing that it's open-sourcing some of its latest artificial intelligence (A.I.) software for segmenting objects within images. The DeepMask, SharpMask, and MultiPathNet tools are available now on GitHub under a BSD license. It's not as if Facebook is opening up about these programs for the first time. They've been described in academic papers (specifically this one, this one, and this one). Now Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab is connecting the dots with an extensive blog post and is also, of course, making the software available free for others to inspect and build on.

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