Facebook’s controversial AI to get even smarter: Under-fire social network teams up with Intel to make its AI chips
- Chip could dramatically improve facial recognition and other applications
- Will put pair in competition with Amazon and Nvidia
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Facebook’s AI is already able to recognize faces in million of pictures uploaded to the service – and its about to get a lot smarter.
Intel has revealed it is working with Facebook on a new artificial intelligence chip to be released in the second half of this year.
It will dramatically boost Facebook’s ability to tagging friends in photos automatically, the firm hopes.
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The new chip will help with parts of AI that allow Facebook to tag friends in photos automatically, for instance
The chips, revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, are Intel’s gambit to retain hold of a fast-growing segment of the artificial intelligence computing market.
It puts the pair into direct competition with similar chips from Nvidia Corp and Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services unit.
The new chip will help with what researchers call inference, which is the process of taking an artificial intelligence algorithm and putting it to use, for example by tagging friends in photos automatically.
‘We are thrilled to have Facebook in close collaboration sharing their technical insights as we bring this new generation of AI hardware to market,’ Intel CEO Brian Krzanich wrote
Intel’s processors currently dominate the market for machine learning inference, which analysts at Morningstar believe will be worth $11.8 billion (9.24 billion pounds) by 2021.
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In September, Nvidia launched its own inference chip to compete with Intel.
In November, Amazon also said it had created an inference chip.
Amazon’s chip is not a direct threat to Intel and Nvidia’s business because it will not be selling the chips.
Amazon will sell services to its cloud customers that run atop the chips starting next year.
If Amazon relies on its own chips, it could deprive both Nvidia and Intel of a major customer.
Also at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday, Intel said that Dell Technologies Inc will feature Intel’s next generation of processors in its XPS line of laptops. The so-called 10-nanometer chips have been plagued by delays.
But Navin Shenoy, Intel’s data centre chief, reiterated that the new chips will be available in laptops by the 2019 holiday shopping season and in data centres by early next year.
Also at the conference, Amnon Shashua, the head of Intel’s Mobileye self-driving car computer unit, said Mobileye has mapped out all of the roadways in Japan, using cameras that were already embedded in vehicles produced by Nissan Motor Co Ltd that come with Mobileye systems from the factory.
Intel’s tech rivals such as Alphabet Inc and Apple Inc are gathering mapping data through special vehicles with cameras mounted on top of them.
FACEBOOK’S PRIVACY DISASTERS
Facebook in late September disclosed that it had been hit by its worst ever data breach, affecting 50 million users – including those of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Attackers exploited the site’s ‘View As’ feature, which lets people see what their profiles look like to other users.
The unknown attackers took advantage of a feature in the code called ‘Access Tokens,’ to take over people’s accounts, potentially giving hackers access to private messages, photos and posts – although Facebook said there was no evidence that had been done.
The hackers also tried to harvest people’s private information, including name, sex and hometown, from Facebook’s systems.
Facebook said it doesn’t yet know if information from the affected accounts has been misused or accessed, and is working with the FBI to conduct further investigations.
However, Mark Zuckerberg assured users that passwords and credit card information was not accessed.
Facebook says it has found no evidence ‘so far’ that hackers broke into third-party apps after a data breach exposed 50 million users (stock image)
As a result of the breach, the firm logged roughly 90 million people out of their accounts earlier today as a security measure.
Facebook made headlines earlier this year after the data of 87 million users was improperly accessed by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy.
The disclosure has prompted government inquiries into the company’s privacy practices across the world, and fueled a ‘#deleteFacebook’ movement among consumers.
Communications firm Cambridge Analytica had offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia.
The company boasts it can ‘find your voters and move them to action’ through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists.
‘Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections,’ with data on more than 230 million American voters, Cambridge Analytica claims on its website.
The company profited from a feature that meant apps could ask for permission to access your own data as well as the data of all your Facebook friends.
The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix (pictured), after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump
This meant the company was able to mine the information of 87 million Facebook users even though just 270,000 people gave them permission to do so.
This was designed to help them create software that can predict and influence voters’ choices at the ballot box.
The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump.
This information is said to have been used to help the Brexit campaign in the UK.
It has also suffered several previous issues.
2013, Facebook disclosed a software flaw that exposed 6 million users’ phone numbers and email addresses to unauthorized viewers for a year, while a technical glitch in 2008 revealed confidential birth-dates on 80 million Facebook users’ profiles.
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