The Metaverse Could Fund Important Artificial Intelligence Work

Meta Unveils Voice Mods for the Metaverse Plus AI-powered ‘universal speech translator’

Some context here, I didn’t realize Zuck was building the Holodeck.

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If you aren’t a nerd like me, the?Holodeck?is a fictional device from the television franchise?Star Trek?which uses "holograms" (projected light and electromagnetic energy which create the illusion of solid objects) to create a realistic 3D simulation of a real or imaginary setting, in which participants can freely interact with the environment as well as objects and characters, and sometimes a predefined narrative.

I also didn’t realize voice-mods were going to be a thing in the Metaverse. If you are into gaming, you will realize the great importance of this. Ambient computing will feel very different in the Metaverse, and this has considerable impact on A.I. Research.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has announced an ambitious new AI research project to create translation software that works for “everyone in the world.” The part that caught my attention is AI smart enough to translate our words and commands into realistic VR generated settings.

Facebook's Meta unveils AI projects aimed at building the metaverse

What is the Metaverse?

Zuckerberg is betting that the?metaverse, a futuristic idea of virtual environments where users can work, socialize and play, will be the successor to the mobile internet.?

Eventually a lot of the atmosphere and interactions in the Metaverse will be generated by A.I.

A.I. Builder Bot in the Metaverse

Zuckerberg said Meta was working (in an event in late February, 2022) on a new class of generative AI models that will allow people to describe a world and generate aspects of it. He showcased an?AI concept called Builder Bot?-- which allows users to describe what they want the AI to generate. He showed a demo where he, as a legless avatar on an island, commanded AI through speech to create a beach and then add clouds, trees and even a picnic blanket.

We already knew a?Universal Language generator in real-time ?was coming years ago thanks to Google, so that aspect of the presentation didn’t really wow me that much.

"The key to unlocking a lot of these advances is AI," he said, speaking at the company's live-streamed "Inside the Lab" event. - Mark Zuckerberg

The Inside the Lab live-streaming event was held on February 23rd, 2022.

“The ability to communicate with anyone in any language — that’s a superpower people have dreamed of forever, and AI is going to deliver that within our lifetimes,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an online presentation.

So while Meta builds AI that will enable us to moderate the Metaverse to our needs and preferences, it’s also working on language facilitation. In this regard Meta’s first focus, dubbed?No Language Left Behind, will concentrate on building AI models that can learn to translate language using fewer training examples.

The second, Universal Speech Translator, will aim to build systems that directly translate speech in real-time from one language to another without the need for a written component to serve as an intermediary (a common technique for many translation apps).

See Meta's Blog on Language Translation

Meta researchers did not offer a timeframe for completing these projects or even a roadmap for major milestones in reaching their goal. Instead, the company stressed the utopian possibilities of universal language translation.

What Will Actually Make the Metaverse Successful?

I think the utopia possibility of modding via speech-to-AI in VR spaces offers a bit more freedom.

He showed a demo where he, as a legless avatar on an island, commanded AI through speech to create a beach and then add clouds, trees and even a picnic blanket.

"As we advance this technology further, you'll be able to create nuanced worlds to explore and share experiences with others, with just your voice," said Zuckerberg.

Having a virtual date with a friend or family member across the world in the Metaverse sounds like something good for people.

The building aspect of voice-generated AI-created worlds is truly like a next generation of modding. Modding refers to how people crowdsource their skills to make games better by adding user-created-content into the gaming world.

Put another way, Video game modding (short for "modification") is the process of alteration by players or fans of one or more aspects of a video game, such as how it looks or behaves, and is a sub-discipline of general modding. The fact that it will be easy to do in the Metaverse is really important for Facebook’s future success.

The challenge of pivoting to the Metaverse gives Facebook the chance to really upgrade its artificial intelligence systems and research to make the goal a reality.

The Metaverse can also level the playing field for accessibility to the internet, digital tools and software that those who speak the world’s most common languages today enjoy.

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The Problem of Linguistic Minorities

Meta’s conception of the Metaverse clearly as AI as a force for good in the future immersive VR world.

• The company says that although commonly spoken languages like English, Mandarin, and Spanish are well catered to by current translation tools, roughly 20 percent of the world’s population do not speak languages covered by these systems.
• Often, these under-served languages do not have easily accessible corpuses of written text that are needed to train AI systems or sometimes have no standardized writing system at all.

The Metaverse is Dependent on Better Artificial Intelligence

If AI can facilitate universal language translation and speed-to-voice creation of Metaverse environments, it suddenly feels more like a real product.

So when we think of the $10 billion a year Facebook is investing in its Metaverse pivot, we should really think of it as mostly AI-based research to help humans augment themselves with A.I. in a digital-transformative native environment.

In such world there could be more freedom and not simply algorithms influencing our mobile decisions on a touch phone.

Meta AI is announcing a long-term effort to build language and MT tools that will include most of the world’s languages. This is a huge undertaking and wouldn’t be possible without the $Billions of dollars it has made on us in the last fifteen years of digital advertising.

Meta is exploring how artificial intelligence can be used to moderate content and activity in the metaverse.

“We use a lot of AI for moderation on our main platforms … the metaverse is a bit of a different beast, it’s a lot more real-time,” said Pesenti, who said this was “evolving work” and that Meta was still figuring out the policies for metaverse activity.

Zuckerberg said Meta was also working on egocentric data, which involves seeing worlds from a first-person perspective. This could also enable A.I. systems that learns to see and learn from the world more like we do. The Metaverse could essentially produce a ton of synthetic data for A.I. to train upon.

So the Metaverse whether it succeeds or fails for Meta as a company, will be a huge playground for A.I. essentially that will be good A.I’s evolution:

• Universal language tools
• Voice modding AI world creation
• A.I. moderating people in the Metaverse
• Self-supervised learning breakthroughs at the intersection of A.I. and the Metaverse
• More synthetic data for A.I. to train upon.

So maybe something as grand as the Metaverse, needed Facebook to be this tycoon catalyst pushing the thing into being? Only the future will know for sure.

The Metaverse could be inspiring, it could also be lucrative if Meta figures out a way to become?an Ed-tech giant?with the use of the Metaverse. AI moderated education in VR could be useful. Meta has enough free cash to acquire Ed-tech companies to build such a product.

One thing is for certain, the Metaverse needs to not simply have Advertising as the only way Facebook makes money. If it decoupled and diversified away from advertising, the world would actually become a better place.

Meta’s AI research in the space does seem impressive. It’s certainly true that advances in machine learning in recent years have hugely improved the speed and accuracy of machine translation.

This kind of R&D is also expensive and bringing down the value of the stock which recently went below $200, just today (this article is a few days old). This month Meta reported a 2021 net loss of $10.2 billion from its Reality Labs, the company's augmented and virtual reality business.?

Facebook-owner Meta is working on artificial intelligence research to generate worlds through speech, improve how people chat to voice assistants and translate between languages. But it’s also building?speech to AI systems that could empower future AI systems and change fundamentally how we relate to artificial intelligence itself.

That’s the big takeaway for me.

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