Meta describes how AI will unlock the metaverse Posted on : Mar 07 - 2022

It’s not news that Mark Zuckerberg wants to lead the charge in the emergent metaverse with his company, Meta (formerly Facebook). The recently concluded Meta event titled “Inside the lab: Building for the metaverse with AI” was another step in Meta’s quest to unlock the metaverse with AI, after its previous announcement that it was developing a record-breaking supercomputer to power the metaverse. Experts have said that AI, VR, AR, blockchain and 5G will converge to power the metaverse, and Zuckerberg is keen on building several huge AI systems that will drive the nascent metaverse world.

“We work on a lot of different technologies here at Meta — everything from virtual reality to designing our own data centers. And we’re particularly focused on foundational technologies that can make entirely new things possible. Today, we’re going to focus on perhaps the most important foundational technology of our time: artificial intelligence,” said Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg says the kinds of experiences we’ll have in the metaverse are beyond what’s possible today, describing the metaverse as “an immersive version of the internet.” He said the metaverse will require advances across a whole range of areas — from new hardware devices to software for building and exploring worlds — and AI is the key to unlocking a lot of these advances.

A new approach to self-supervised learning

Following Zuckerberg’s introductory note at the event, leader of Facebook AI, Jérôme Pesenti, and co-managing director at Facebook AI Research, Joelle Pineau, drilled into how Meta wants to unlock the metaverse with AI in a session titled “Unlocking the Metaverse with AI and Open Science.” Pesenti noted that AI is one of the keys to the metaverse. He said the mission of Meta AI is to bring the world closer together by advancing AI through AI research breakthroughs and improving Meta products through them.

Pesenti said Meta AI is making significant advancements in critical areas like embodiment and robotics, creativity and self-supervised learning. Traditionally, self-supervised learning — where machines learn from direct human supervision — was achieved by teaching oriented systems to perform a single task by giving them lots of human-generated examples. However, the challenge with this approach, according to Pesenti, is that it’s task-dependent. In this approach, it isn’t clear when the machine really understands beyond the narrow task, and requires a lot of human labor that can introduce unwanted biases.

Pesenti said that Meta AI is moving to another self-supervised approach, where AI can learn data without any human supervision. View more