Facebook is developing a news-summarising AI called TL;DR

Facebook is developing an AI called TL;DR which summarises news into shorter snippets.

Anyone who’s spent much time on the web will know what TL;DR stands for⁠—but, for everyone else, it’s an acronym for “Too Long, Didn’t Read”.

It’s an understandable sentiment we’ve all felt at some point. People lead busy lives. Some outlets now even specialise in short, at-a-glance news.

The problem is, it’s hard to get the full picture of a story in just...

Facebook uses AI to help people support each other

Facebook has deployed an AI system which matches people needing support with local heroes offering it.“United we stand, divided we fall” is a clichéd saying—but tackling a pandemic is a collective effort. While we’ve all seen people taking selfish actions, they’ve been more than balanced out by those helping to support their communities.

Facebook has been its usual blessing and a curse during the pandemic. On the one hand, it's helped people to stay connected and...

2 October 2020 | Facebook

Facebook pledges crackdown on deepfakes ahead of the US presidential election

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Facebook has pledged to crack down on misleading deepfakes ahead of the US presidential election later this year.

Voter manipulation is a concern for any functioning democracy and deepfakes provide a whole new challenge for social media platforms.

A fake video of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, went viral last year after purportedly showing her slurring her words as if she was intoxicated. The clip shows how even a relatively...

8 January 2020 | Deepfakes

Esteemed consortium launch AI natural language processing benchmark

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A research consortium featuring some of the greatest minds in AI are launching a benchmark to measure natural language processing (NLP) abilities.

The consortium includes Google DeepMind, Facebook AI, New York University, and the University of Washington. Each of the consortium’s members believe a more comprehensive benchmark is needed for NLP than current solutions.

The result is a benchmarking platform called SuperGLUE which replaces an older platform called GLUE...

15 August 2019 | Facebook

Facebook lends its AI powers to the OpenStreetMap community

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Facebook is providing its Map With AI service to the largest open-source mapping project, OpenStreetMap.

Whereas mapping efforts from Google and Apple focus on navigating major cities, OpenStreetMap aims to ensure the smallest dirt paths are mapped.

Mapping the whole Earth is no small task: a sizeable local community helps, but it’s an impossible task manually both due to scale and often difficult to make out imagery.

In a Facebook blog post, mapping expert...

24 July 2019 | Facebook

Facebook outage gave a glimpse at how its AI analyses images

Facebook’s issue displaying images yesterday gave users an interesting look at how the social media giant’s AI analyses their uploads.

An outage yesterday meant Facebook users were unable to see uploaded images, providing a welcome respite from the usual mix of food and baby photos. In their place, however, was some interesting text.

Text in the placeholder where the image should have been displayed showed how Facebook’s AI automatically tagged the...

4 July 2019 | Facebook

Facebook uses AI to counter distress caused by profiles of the deceased

Facebook wants to harness AI to prevent distressing occurrences where a deceased loved one's profile is shown as if alive on the platform.

Many of us have been there, we've logged in to Facebook to find a notification alerting us to say “Happy birthday!” to a loved one who's no longer with us. Or, sometimes, they can appear as a suggestion to invite to an event.

These are distressing moments for people, and short of ‘unfriending’ or blocking the profile they can...

10 April 2019 | Facebook

Facebook pumps $7.5m into an independent AI ethics centre

An independent AI ethics research centre is set to receive $7.5 million of funding courtesy of the folks at Facebook.

The new research centre is called the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and was created in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Facebook, like many companies, is fighting outside concerns about the development of AI and its potential societal impact. The centre should help to ensure Facebook keeps up with ethical best...

21 January 2019 | Ethics

Facebook is planning on doubling its AI unit by 2020

Facebook’s plans to double its artificial intelligence unit by 2020 indicates just how important the firm considers it to be. The so-called FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) division at the company has approximately 180-200 staff. Speaking to Forbes, Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun said he expects the division to double by 2020. Already, he admits, "I don't know everybody's name anymore and I don't recognise everybody either”. The innovative AI division at...

1 October 2018 | Facebook

Facebook can open closed eyes in photos using AI correction

An AI-powered solution by a pair of Facebook engineers may be able to fix those photos that have been ruined by someone blinking at the wrong moment. The company published a 10-page research paper (PDF) this week detailing how their system works and likened it to existing photo retouching tools such as red-eye correction. Facebook’s idea is not entirely original, a similar feature exists in Adobe Photoshop Elements. The engineers acknowledge this in their paper but believe their ExGAN...

20 June 2018 | Facebook