The technology giant Meta, the company you know as Facebook, held a press conference tonight (Wednesday) that deals with the role of artificial intelligence in building the meta-verses. The founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has unveiled new breakthroughs for the company in the field as personal assistants who will take a significant part and know how to create things and art as well as translate any language into any language in real time.
At the start of the press conference, Zuckerberg talked about how technologies like artificial intelligence would help us navigate the meta-wars. “When we have virtual or augmented reality goggles on our faces, this will be the first time that an artificial intelligence system can truly see the world from our point of view: see what we see, hear what we hear and more,” he said. In other words he says that artificial intelligence will have to learn context and even have to know how to act the way humans know how to act. These technologies are still far from being available to the public, but he announced two of them tonight.
AI-driven personal assistants who know how to create anything for you in Meta-Versus
According to Zuckberg, Meta is exploring an artificial intelligence model that will allow people to build a virtual world, just by describing them aloud. This system is called Builder Bot and it is an artificial intelligence that functions as a personal assistant, which can be given voice commands and it produces.
In a pre-recorded video, Zuckerberg showed viewers how he creates a virtual space with this bot, starting with commands like “Let’s go to the beach”, which changes the three-dimensional space to a landscape of a designed beach, which of course includes sand and water. Zuckerberg asks the personal assistant to produce some wood, a table, and a speaker and a few other things. He also asks the assistant to play tropical music or animal sounds. To laugh and get down on himself, Zuckerberg creates a model of hydrofoil – which is a sea vessel that Zuckerberg really likes.
Zuckerberg said that “everything is created with the help of artificial intelligence,” but it is still unclear whether this relies on a limited library of man-made models or whether artificial intelligence also shapes products now. It is important to say however, the demo was relatively relaxed, we did not see any crazy designs and graphics unlike the first announcement which was significantly spectacular.
The builder bot is part of a larger artificial intelligence project called the CAIRaoke project. In fact, the goal of the project, which Zuckerberg emphasized as important to society, is to develop an artificial intelligence model for creating a dialogue with personal assistants and the uses and expressions that emerge from such a move. The assistants become much more trained and efficient, because the assistant has a character, he understands the connections and nuances, he remembers things (for example what color the client’s favorite), knows how to change topics and more. The idea is that the interaction will be more natural, smooth, fast and pleasant. In other words, it is a technology designed to study and predict human behavior for meta-uses.
Zuckerberg of course did not ignore the announcement that this technology could be misused. At the conceptual level, users will be able to ask for very bad things like offensive content, or for example the AI will train itself and create various biases and stereotypes – but the fact that Zuckerberg mentions it out loud means they are looking into the matter. Of course it is impossible to know what will happen there, and at the moment it is just a reading of direction.
Translate speech from any language to any language in real time
Meta’s research division is also working on a universal speech translation system designed to improve the interactions of meta-users with the help of artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg announced two programs: the first – No Language Left Behind, a translation system capable of learning “any language” they claim, “even when there is not much text available to learn from.” Zuckerberg said they are developing a single model “that can translate hundreds of languages with up-to-date results and language connections,” he said.
The second program is to create Universal Speech Translator, a universal speech translator. The goal here is to allow immediate translation of speech into speech, in all languages and in all styles. In fact, it is an artificial intelligence that will translate any language into any language, in real time. The AI will learn all types of languages (written and spoken) and translate them into any language easily. Zuckerberg mostly boasted that it would help overcome language gaps in the meta-wars: a user from Portugal would be able to talk to someone from Israel, and the conversation would be fluent and relevant and not in unfamiliar language.
Another point Zuckerberg talked about is translation between two languages other than English. According to the teams in the meta, most systems will first convert the original language to English and then the text will be re-translated into the other language. This leads to translation problems, process distortions and creates some dependency, which limits the efficiency of such systems. Therefore, Meta said she is working on speech-to-speech systems without switching to English, meaning they will not have to use English on the way, and then the translation will be efficient and meaningful by being direct and accurate.