Facebook developing AI tool to read minds, summarize articles: Report

American technology conglomerate Facebook on December 15 told its employees that it is developing a mind-reading Artificial intelligence tool to summarise news articles without users having to read the entire piece. Even as legal challenges mount on the social network, Buzzfeed reported Facebook laying out early plans for a neural sensor to detect people’s thoughts and further transferring them into action. 

As per the audio of Facebook’s end-of-year meeting obtained by the media outlet, the announcements about the new tool along with product demos were made in the session. Despite the striking controversies with its policies, hate-speech regulations, employee discontent and lawsuits ranging from state to federal administrations, Facebook’s latest Tuesday meeting was broadcast virtually to reportedly thousands of employees and was led by company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

The meeting, in which the new AI tool was unveiled, also featured several pre-recorded messages of company executives to mark an end to the year dominated with COVID-19 pandemic and misinformation following widespread protests across the world. As per reports, despite the challenges, the social network hired over 20,000 new workers in 2020. 

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Facebook’s AI glasses and translator for 100 languages

The AI tool for reading minds came after in October, Facebook unveiled a software based on machine learning that can translate between any pair of 100 languages without relying on English. The first multilingual machine translation (MMT) model is an open-source artificial intelligence software which directly trains on one language to another without using English as intermediate data which helps preserve the meaning.

Meanwhile, in September, Facebook unveiled what it called “building the future” of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), new AR glasses that can amplify what the wearer wants to hear even in a noisy environment. Releasing the details of the insides of Facebook Reality Labs Research, the California-based company elaborated on the “perpetual superpowers” that are the AR systems figuring out what an individual is trying to hear and then magnify it to dampen the background voices.

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