Meta’s Zuckerberg: ‘AI is perhaps the most important foundational technology of our time’

Meta Properties founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday held an all-hands presentation with the team of the company’s artificial intelligence group, including deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun, the topic, “Building for the metaverse with AI.” 

The AI Lab’s proposition, displayed on its Facebook home page, is “Through the power of artificial intelligence, we will enable a world where people can easily share, create, and connect physically and virtually, with anyone, anywhere.” 

Zuckerberg called artificial intelligence “perhaps the most important foundational technology of our time.”

Zuckerberg said the company is unveiling something called “Project CAIRaoke.” He said the company’s focus in AI for The Metaverse consists of two areas of AI research “Egocentric perception,” and “a whole new class of generative AI models,” as Zuckerberg put it.

Zuckerberg announced “no language left behind,” which would results in a “single model that can understand hundreds of languages.” 

He also announced what he called “a universal speech translator” that would offer instantaneous translation. “AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes,” said Zuckerberg.

The day’s presentation was focused on the theme of “self-self supervised learning,” where a neural network is developed by amassing vastly more data without carefully applied labels. Lecun explained to IEEE Spectrum’s Eliza Strickland the virtues of self-supervised learning in an email exchanged published Tuesday. 

Following Zuckerberg’s introduction, Jérôme Pesenti, the leader of the AI team, explained that self-supervised models are increasingly catching up with supervised neural network training, not only in language models but in areas such as image recognition.