Jerome Pesenti has a few reasons to celebrate Meta's decision last week to release Llama 3, a powerful open source large language model that anyone can download, run, and build on. Pesenti used to be vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta and says he often pushed the company to consider releasing its technology for others to use and build on. But his main reason to rejoice is that his new startup will get access to an AI model that he says is very close in power to OpenAI's industry-leading text generator GPT-4, but considerably cheaper to run and more open to outside scrutiny and modification. "The release last Friday really feels like a game-changer," Pesenti says. His new company, Sizzle, an AI tutor, currently uses GPT-4 and other AI models, both closed and open, to craft problem sets and curricula for students.

Meta Platforms Inc., the social media giant's parent company, announced plans last week to go the other way--decentralizing how it develops advanced AI and machine learning tools. In an online post Thursday, Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said the company's previous approach, centered around a handful of stand-alone R&D hubs, made it difficult to integrate new AI capabilities across the business. "In the new model we will distribute the ownership of these AI systems back to Meta's product groups," Mr. Bosworth said. "We believe that this will accelerate the adoption of important new technology across the company while allowing us to continue to push the envelope." The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team.

He said, "The ability to communicate with anyone in any language is a superpower that was dreamt of forever." Meta's early metaverse platform, called Horizon Worlds, already allows people to socialize virtually while represented by avatars. "The kinds of experiences you'll have in the metaverse are beyond what's possible today," Zuckerberg said as he opened a conference aiming to offer a glimpse inside Meta's development labs. Meta is exploring how artificial intelligence can be used to moderate content and activity in the metaverse, its AI head Pesenti told Reuters. "We use a lot of AI for moderation on our main platforms … the metaverse is a bit of a different beast, it's a lot more real-time," said Pesenti, who said this was "evolving work" and that Meta was still figuring out the policies for metaverse activity.

It's not news that Mark Zuckerberg wants to lead the charge in the emergent metaverse with his company, Meta (formerly Facebook). The recently concluded Meta event titled "Inside the lab: Building for the metaverse with AI" was another step in Meta's quest to unlock the metaverse with AI, after its previous announcement that it was developing a record-breaking supercomputer to power the metaverse. Experts have said that AI, VR, AR, blockchain and 5G will converge to power the metaverse, and Zuckerberg is keen on building several huge AI systems that will drive the nascent metaverse world. "We work on a lot of different technologies here at Meta -- everything from virtual reality to designing our own data centers. And we're particularly focused on foundational technologies that can make entirely new things possible. Today, we're going to focus on perhaps the most important foundational technology of our time: artificial intelligence," said Zuckerberg.

It's not news that Mark Zuckerberg wants to lead the charge in the emergent metaverse with his company, Meta (formerly Facebook). The recently concluded Meta event titled "Inside the lab: Building for the metaverse with AI" was another step in Meta's quest to unlock the metaverse with AI, after its previous announcement that it was developing a record-breaking supercomputer to power the metaverse. Experts have said that AI, VR, AR, blockchain and 5G will converge to power the metaverse, and Zuckerberg is keen on building several huge AI systems that will drive the nascent metaverse world. "We work on a lot of different technologies here at Meta -- everything from virtual reality to designing our own data centers. And we're particularly focused on foundational technologies that can make entirely new things possible. Today, we're going to focus on perhaps the most important foundational technology of our time: artificial intelligence," said Zuckerberg.

Feb 23 (Reuters) - Facebook-owner Meta (FB.O) is working on artificial intelligence research to generate worlds through speech, improve how people chat to voice assistants and translate between languages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, as he sketched out key steps to building the metaverse. Zuckerberg is betting that the metaverse, a futuristic idea of virtual environments where users can work, socialize and play, will be the successor to the mobile internet. "The key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI," he said, speaking at the company's live-streamed "Inside the Lab" event. Zuckerberg said Meta was working on a new class of generative AI models that will allow people to describe a world and generate aspects of it. In a prerecorded demo, Zuckerberg showcased an AI concept called Builder Bot, where he appeared as a legless 3D avatar on an island and gave speech commands to create a beach and then add clouds, trees and even a picnic blanket.

Facebook-owner Meta is working on artificial intelligence research to generate worlds through speech to improve how people chat to voice assistants and translate between languages, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday, as he sketched out key steps to building the metaverse. Zuckerberg is betting that the metaverse, a futuristic idea of virtual environments where users can work, socialize and play, will be the successor to the mobile internet. "The key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI," he said, speaking at the company's live-streamed "Inside the Lab" event. Zuckerberg said Meta was working on a new class of generative AI models that will allow people to describe a world and generate aspects of it. In a prerecorded demo, Zuckerberg showcased an AI concept called Builder Bot, where he appeared as a legless 3D avatar on an island and gave speech commands to create a beach and then add clouds, trees and even a picnic blanket.

The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. Meta, which announced the news in a blog post Monday, said its research team currently is using the supercomputer to train AI models in natural-language processing and computer vision for research. The aim is to boost capabilities to one day train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte, which is roughly equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video. "The experiences we're building for the metaverse require enormous compute power…and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal. By mid-summer, when the AI Research SuperCluster is fully built, it will house some 16,000 GPUs, becoming the fastest AI supercomputer in the world, Meta said.

On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it was ending its Face Recognition system on the app and rolling back the technology in the coming weeks. In a press release, Jerome Pesenti, VP of artificial intelligence at Meta (the new name for Facebook's parent company), said that the shutting down of the Face Recognition system and the imminent deletion of Facebook's library of facial recognition templates is "a company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication." Soon, Facebook will no longer automatically recognize people's faces in Memories, photos or videos uploaded to the app, or give suggestions for tagging who's in a photo or video. It will also not be able to notify users if they appear in other photos or videos across the site. However, users can still manually tag friends in photos.

Just days after rebranding itself, Facebook announced plans to delete a trove of the most worrisome data that the world's biggest social network collected on more than a billion individuals. In a blog post Tuesday, Facebook's newly named parent company Meta explained that it would close shop on its facial recognition systems and delete a massive collection of more than a billion facial recognition templates used to pair faces with photos and videos. Facebook will no longer do that pairing moving forward for users who previously opted in. Facebook introduced facial recognition in 2010 to automatically tag photos with names. The feature was automatically enabled at launch, and Facebook only made the system explicitly opt-in in 2019, a choice that explains how it managed to compile more than a billion facial recognition profiles.