Facebook to partner European universities in AI research

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will progress its AI research by collaborating with European universities, beginning with the Technical University of Berlin. He said that by 2025 the company will have made progress in Messenger's voice-to-text feature.

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Facebook will team up with European universities to help it advance artificial intelligence research, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an event in Berlin on Thursday.

Zuckerberg said corporate environments have better access to resources needed to advance AI research, but universities tend to have the top minds.

As a result, Facebook will be giving universities across Europe access to 200 graphic processing units, which help process deep learning better than traditional central processing units.

The first university to partner with the social media giant will be the Technical University of Berlin, Zuckerberg said. He did not mention any other partners during his presentation.

Yann LeCun, Facebook's director of AI research, appeared alongside Zuckerberg during the live presentation. When LeCun joined Facebook in 2013, the company opened AI laboratories in Paris, France, where LeCun was born.

Although Zuckerberg and LeCun were vague as to what how these European universities will help advance Facebook projects, the subject of deep learning was brought up multiple times, an AI field LeCun actually helped revive.

Deep learning helps power the self-learning abilities of Facebook's ad targeting and is an integral part of M, Facebook's virtual assistant. LeCun leads the team developing the technology behind M.

"The bigger the community, the more smart people to get involved in a topic, the faster it advances," LeCun said of partnering with different universities.

Zuckerberg added that there's a "long tradition" of AI research across Europe, and that it will be important to utilize that to advance Facebook's research projects.

"It was very clear from the beginning that we couldn't do this without a very significant part of that work being done across Europe," he said.

Facebook is working on a number of things that utilize AI, one of which is giving Messenger the ability to transcribe messages that are said outloud. Zuckerberg said by 2025 the company will have made progress on that front.