Meta revealed, on June 2, the departure of one of its executives in charge of artificial intelligence (AI) and the restructuring of the teams in this area. This announcement comes just one day after the resignation of Sheryl Sandberg, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s most loyal collaborators.
Complete restructuring for the IA branch of Meta
Jérôme Pesenti, vice-president of AI at Meta for 4 years, will leave his post during the month of June as part of this reorganization. Indeed, the Californian company has decided to reorganize the teams dealing with artificial intelligence and to integrate them into other sectors in order to decompartmentalize the AI branch.
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The team studying responsible AI will join the people working on social impact at Meta. Product AI employees will join the product engineering team with the goal of continuing to protect users and improve content targeting. Finally, the AI4AR (Artificial Intelligence for Augmented Reality) division will merge with the teams working on mixed reality within Meta’s Reality Labs.
As for the members of FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research), the team entirely dedicated to fundamental research on AI, they will become a new pillar of the research part of Reality Labs. Their mission will always be to discover new technological advances for the field of artificial intelligence. Joëlle Pineau, Antoine Bordes and Yann LeCun will remain at the head of the management of the FAIR teams.
This structural reorganization will allow the Californian giant to facilitate the implementation of AI in its various services. For Andrew Bosworthtechnical director of Meta, “ centralized approaches come up against their limits when the gap between two services is too great to bridge. With this redesign, we look forward to pushing the boundaries of what AI can do and using it to create new features and products. “.
AI at the heart of products and the metaverse
Many Meta products already use artificial intelligence technologies. This is the case of Facebook and Instagram with targeted advertising. The company’s VR headset, the Meta Quest, uses these advancements to track hand or facial movements. At the end of January, Meta had also revealed its AI supercomputer in order to prepare for the arrival of the metaverse.
In addition, Mark Zuckerberg intends to use AI to satisfy his great ambitions. For him, artificial intelligence is an essential component in the development of this virtual world on which Meta is betting big. ” Much of AI research today is focused on understanding the physical world. But in the metaverse, we will need an AI designed to help people navigate virtual worlds as well as our physical world with virtual reality. And since these worlds will be dynamic and constantly changing, the AI will need to be able to understand the context and learn like humans do. “, he explained last February, during theInside the Lab. With this restructuring Meta continues to put itself in working order for a project that will take many more years.