Meet The Man Who Makes Facebook’s Machines Think

Meet The Man Who Makes Facebook’s Machines Think: Nearly 3,000 miles away from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, in an old, beige office building in downtown Manhattan, a group of company employees is working on projects that seem better suited for science fiction than social networking. The team, Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research — known internally as FAIR — is focused on a singular goal: to create computers with intelligence on par with humans. While still far from its finish line, the group is making the sort of progress few believed possible at the turn of the decade. Its AI programs are drawing pictures almost indistinguishable from those by human artists and taking quizzes on subject matter culled from Wikipedia. They’re playing advanced video games like Starcraft. Slowly, they’re getting smarter. And someday, they could change Facebook from something that facilitates interaction between friends into something that could be your friend.