Facebook is building a research lab dedicated to the new breed of artificial intelligence, after hiring one of the preeminent researchers in the field: New York University professor Yann LeCun.
With a post to Facebook this morning, LeCun announced that he had been tapped to run the lab, and the company confirmed the news with WIRED.
"Facebook has created a new research laboratory with the ambitious, long-term goal of bringing about major advances in Artificial Intelligence," LeCun wrote, adding that Facebook's AI lab will include operations in Menlo Park, California, at the company's headquarters; in London; and at Facebook's new offices in New York City. In an email to WIRED, he said that he would remain in his position as a professor at NYU, maintaining teaching and research duties part-time, but that he would be based at Facebook's Manhattan office, which is only a a block from NYU's main campus.
LeCun sits at the heart of a new AI movement known as "deep learning." The movement began in the academic world, but is now spreading to the giants of the web, including not only Facebook but Google, companies that are constantly looking for new means of building services that can interact with people more like the way we interact with each other. Google is already using deep learning techniques to help analyze and respond to voice commands on its Android mobile operating system.
With deep learning, the basic idea is to build machines that actually operate like the human brain -- as opposed to creating systems that merely take a shortcut to solving problems that have traditionally required human intelligence. In the past, for instance, something like the Google's Search engine has tried to approximate human intelligence by rapidly analyzing enormous amounts of data, but people like LeCun aim to build massive "neutral networks" that actually mimic the way the brain works.
The trouble is that we don't completely understand how that the brain works. But in recent years, LeCun and others in this field, including, most notably, University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton, have made some significant progress in the area of deep learning, so much so that they're now being hired by the giants of the tech world. As LeCun builds an AI lab at Facebook, Hinton is now on staff at Google, building a system alongside other researchers from Toronto.
Andrew Ng, the Stanford researcher who founded Google's deep learning project, known as the Google Brain, says that LeCun and Facebook are a natural fit. "Yann LeCun's move will be an exciting step both for machine learning and for Facebook," Ng says.
"Machine learning is already used in hundreds of places throughout Facebook, ranging from photo tagging to ranking articles to your news feed. Better machine learning will be able to help improve all of these features, as well as help Facebook create new applications that none of us have dreamed of yet."
Additional reporting by Daniela Hernandez
