Facebook’s AI is getting scarily intelligent, scarily fast

Facebook is putting some serious effort into Artificial Intelligence, and not just so that Mark Zuckerberg can have his own Jarvis-style personal home assistant either.

In a Facebook post published on Wednesday, the hoodied one shared some of the work being done by the social network’s AI division. He illustrated the work with a video of the AI playing the Chinese game Go, one of the few activities where human beings can still routinely beat machines.

According to Zuckerberg, scientists have been trying to teach computers to win at Go for some 20 years now.

Read more: Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolution is to build his own Jarvis-style personal assistant

“We’re getting close,” he writes, “and in the past six months we’ve built an AI that can make moves in as fast as 0.1 seconds and still be as good as previous systems that took years to build”.

Facebook’s AI, Zuckerberg says, “combines a search-based approach that models every possible move as the game progresses along with a pattern matching system built by our computer vision team”.

Check out the AI in action.

The ancient Chinese game of Go is one of the last games where the best human players can still beat the best artificial intelligence players. Last year, the Facebook AI Research team started creating an AI that can learn to play Go.Scientists have been trying to teach computers to win at Go for 20 years. We're getting close, and in the past six months we've built an AI that can make moves in as fast as 0.1 seconds and still be as good as previous systems that took years to build. Our AI combines a search-based approach that models every possible move as the game progresses along with a pattern matching system built by our computer vision team.The researcher who works on this, Yuandong Tian, sits about 20 feet from my desk. I love having our AI team right near me so I can learn from what they're working on.You can learn more about this research here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06410

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, January 26, 2016

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