Facebook is making some of its artificial intelligence products available to the public, as the social network hopes to accelerate its own AI product development.
The products, which include computer tools that offer the means to go through large amounts of data, will be donated to Torch, an open source software project focused on deep learning, a form of data analysis.
Facebook relies heavily on ‘deep learning’ to serve up relevant content to its users. Every time a user sees a recommended friend or are given suggestions for who to tag in a photo, they are seeing Facebook’s deep learning AI in action.
Torch is used by tech giants including Google, Microsoft and Twitter to ascertain the probable contents of an image, or to help decide which ads to run online.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has previously referenced such open source tactics as the motivation for setting up the Open Compute Initiative in a bid to catch up with Google, Amazon and Yahoo which are building big data centres.