Meta AI

Meta AI is an American company owned by Meta (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.

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.

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.

Concerns

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.