Meta AI. Meta AI (formerly Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research) is a research division of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) that develops artificial intelligence and augmented and artificial reality technologies. Meta AI deems itself an academic research laboratory, focused on generating knowledge for the AI community, and should not be confused with Meta's Applied Machine Learning (AML) team, which focuses on the practical applications of its products.

History 
The laboratory was founded as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) with locations at the headquarters in Menlo Park, California, London, United Kingdom, and a new laboratory in Manhattan. FAIR was officially announced in September 2013. FAIR was first directed by New York University's Yann LeCun, a deep learning professor and Turing Award winner. Working with NYU's Center for Data Science, FAIR's initial goal was to research data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence and to "understand intelligence, to discover its fundamental principles, and to make machines significantly more intelligent". Research at FAIR pioneered the technology that led to face recognition, tagging in photographs, and personalized feed recommendation. Vladimir Vapnik, a pioneer in statistical learning, joined FAIR in 2014. Vapnik is the co-inventor of the support-vector machine and one of the developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory.

FAIR opened a research center in Paris, France in 2015, and subsequently launched smaller satellite research labs in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Tel Aviv, Montreal and London. In 2016, FAIR partnered with Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft in creating the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, an organization with a focus on open licensed research, supporting ethical and efficient research practices, and discussing fairness, inclusivity, and transparency.

In 2018, Jérôme Pesenti, former CTO of IBM's big data group, assumed the role of president of FAIR, while LeCun stepped down to serve as chief AI scientist. In 2018, FAIR was placed 25th in the AI Research Rankings 2019, which ranked the top global organizations leading AI research. FAIR quickly rose to eighth position in 2019, and maintained eighth position in the 2020 rank. FAIR had approximately 200 staff in 2018, and had the goal to double that number by 2020.

FAIR's initial work included research in learning-model enabled memory networks, self-supervised learning and generative adversarial networks, text classification and translation, as well as computer vision. FAIR released Torch deep-learning modules as well as PyTorch in 2017, an open-source machine learning framework, which was subsequently used in several deep learning technologies, such as Tesla's autopilot  and Uber's Pyro. Also in 2017, FAIR discontinued a research project once AI bots developed a language that was unintelligible to humans, inciting conversations about dystopian fear of artificial intelligence going out of control. However, FAIR clarified that the research had been shut down because they had accomplished their initial goal to understand how languages are generated, rather than out of fear.

FAIR was renamed Meta AI following the rebranding that changed Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc.

In 2022, Meta AI predicted the 3D shape of 600 million potential proteins in two weeks.

Current research

Natural language processing and conversational AI 
Artificial intelligence communication requires a machine to understand natural language and to generate language that is natural. Meta AI seeks to improve these technologies to improve safe communication regardless of what language the user might speak. Thus, a central task involves the generalization of natural language processing (NLP) technology to other languages. As such, Meta AI actively works on unsupervised machine translation. Meta AI seeks to improve natural-language interfaces by developing aspects of chitchat dialogue such as repetition, specificity, response-relatedness and question-asking, incorporating personality into image captioning, and generating creativity-based language.

In November 2022, a large language model designed for generating scientific text, Galactica, was released. Meta withdrew Galactica on 17 November due to offensiveness and inaccuracy. Before the cancellation, researchers were working on Galactica Instruct, which would use instruction tuning to allow the model to follow instructions to manipulate LaTeX documents on Overleaf.

LLaMA 

In February 2023, Meta AI launched LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), a large language model ranging from 7B to 65B parameters.

Hardware 
Until 2022, Meta AI mainly used CPU and in-house custom chip as hardware, before finally switching to Nvidia GPU. This necessitated a complete redesign of several data centers, since they needed 24 to 32 times the networking capacity and new liquid cooling systems.

MTIA v1 
The MTIA v1 is Meta's first-generation AI training and inference accelerator, developed specifically for Meta's recommendation workloads. It was fabricated using TSMC's 7 nm process technology and operates at a frequency of 800 MHz. In terms of processing power, the accelerator provides 102.4 TOPS at INT8 precision and 51.2 TFLOPS at FP16 precision, while maintaining a thermal design power (TDP) of 25 W.

Meta AI offers options for users to customize their interaction with its features. Users are able to mute the AI chatbot on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, temporarily halting notifications from the chatbot. Some platforms also offer the ability to hide certain AI elements from their interface. To locate the relevant settings, users can consult the platform's help documentation or settings menu.

Mathematical theorem proving 

In 2022, Meta created a method for proving mathematical theorems called HyperTree Proof Search (HTPS), which successfully generated proofs of 10 International Mathematical Olympiad problems in Lean.

Since May 2024, the Meta AI chatbot has summarized news from various outlets without linking directly to original articles, including in Canada, where news links are banned on its platforms. This use of news content without compensation has raised ethical and legal concerns, especially as Meta continues to reduce news visibility on its platforms.

Uses 
Meta AI was pre-installed on the second generation of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses on September 27, 2023 as a voice assistant. On April 23, 2024, Meta announced an update to Meta AI on the smart glasses to enable multimodal input via Computer vision. On July 23, 2024, Meta announced that Meta AI with Vision would be incorporated into v68 of Horizon OS on the Meta Quest 3 and Quest Pro for detection of physical objects in passthrough mode, replacing the older voice assistant software in Horizon OS. In addition, Meta AI without Vision is supported on the Quest 2.

Available countries 
Meta AI in English is available in more than a dozen countries outside of the US. Now, people will have access to Meta AI in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bolivia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Jamaica, Malawi, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, United Kingdom, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Coming Soon: Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Yemen

See also 

 Meta Platforms

References

External links 

Meta Platforms
Artificial intelligence laboratories
2013 establishments in California