UPDATED 15:30 EDT / FEBRUARY 23 2022

AI

Mark Zuckerberg unveils Meta’s AI innovations designed to build the metaverse

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg today unveiled a number of artificial intelligence projects the company has been working on with the goal of “building the metaverse.”

The metaverse refers to interconnected virtual worlds where people will be able to come together to socialize, work, play and engage in commerce. Zuckerberg said during his keynote at the company’s Meta AI: Inside the Lab event that he believes that AI will be at the core of building this new technology because connecting so many people to such a complex space will require equally complex tools.

“The kinds of experiences that you’ll have in the metaverse are beyond what is possible today,” he said. “It’s an immersive version of the internet. Instead of just looking at something on a screen, you’re going to actually feel like you’re inside it, or right there present with another person. And that’s going to require advances across a whole range of areas from new software to hardware devices for building and exploring worlds. And the key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI.”

To drive innovations in AI, Meta announced Project CAIRaoke, a new approach to conversational AI for talking with chatbots and assistants. The objective of the project is to take neural models and make chatbots understand people better when they speak conversationally, allowing for more fluid interaction between people and their devices by using natural language processing.

Using this same conversational technology, Meta is also working on a virtual world AI called BuilderBot that is designed to that conversational model and allow people to literally speak their own worlds into being. With BuilderBot in operation, a user can enter into an empty 3D space – filled only with a horizon spanning grid – and simply tell the bot what you want to appear in the world.

For example, telling BuilderBot “Make me an island with some clouds” would quickly render a scene filled with an island, and a sky filled with clouds. Asking the bot to add things like a picnic table with beverages and snacks can also mean at least nobody goes “virtually” hungry in the metaverse.

Currently, the bot can’t replace the work of environmental artists or hours of work, but it does do a fairly good job of placing items and creating templates rapidly from a few spoken words. It’s a good start for users taking their first steps into virtual worlds.

Zuckerberg also said that people entering into the metaverse will be connected globally and that means many languages are being spoken. Nearly half of the world’s population can’t access the internet in their preferred language and that’s because most of it is written in English. To make that worse, most translation software uses English as an intermediary, which causes inaccuracies.

To fix this, Meta is working on an ambitious project called “No Language Left Behind,” a single system capable of translating between all written languages without using an intermediary. The company is also working on a Universal Speech Translator AI project that can provide instantaneous speech-to-speech translation across languages, even those that are primarily spoken. As a result, even people separated by language will not find speech to be a barrier in the metaverse.

Meta is also working to build better models for AI that will allow them to learn faster without requiring brute-force datasets, such as how AI models are currently trained today. Known as data2vec, this is what is called a self-supervised algorithm that learns a lot more like a child, by just observing the world, instead of being fed thousands of images or words all at once and being told to memorize.

This same technology is being put to use for human and AI adaptive models such as the long-term “egocentric perception” data set, Ego4D, that Meta has been building to help AI understand the world from a first-person perspective. Using data2vec, an AI model can quickly learn about complicated subjects such as a game of soccer, baking bread or playing a musical instrument. The objective is to build more adaptive AI technology than exists today.

Image: Meta Platforms

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