As impressively capable as AI systems are these days, teaching machines to perform various tasks, whether its translating speech in real time or accurately differentiating between chihuahuas and blueberry muffins. But that process still involves some amount of hand holding and data curation by the humans training them. However the emergence of self supervised learning (SSL) methods, which have already revolutionized natural language processing, could hold the key to imbuing AI with some much needed common sense. Facebook's AI research division (FAIR) has now, for the first time, applied SSL to computer vision training. "We've developed SEER (SElf-supERvised), a new billion-parameter self-supervised computer vision model that can learn from any random group of images on the internet, without the need for careful curation and labeling that goes into most computer vision training today," Facebook AI researchers wrote in a blog post Thursday.

AI systems already display vision, language and controlled motor skills, but researchers are looking to answer the question: 'When will we have robots that can do housework, communicate in natural language conversations and defend themselves against discrimination?' At the global artificial intelligence conference IJCAI-ECAI 2018 held in Stockholm, Sweden, AI experts and research students from top universities around the world came together to discuss the state of AI as it stands today, and where we are headed in the not-so-distant future. "There won't be a Big AI Bang where complete AI systems suddenly surround us in the next year," says Christian Guttmann, Executive Director of the Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute, "Instead, we will see more and more AI features being included in our products and services." Most researchers are in agreement – artificial intelligence will not become ubiquitous in a day. "The truth is, that despite tremendous advances in AI technologies, we are still far from having robot maids," according to Joyce Chai, Director of the Language and Interaction Research Group at Michigan State University.