Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) is working on designing its own chips to analyze and filter live video content, per chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, as reported by Bloomberg.
![Facebook, Inc. (FB) to Design Chips for Live Video Content Filtering](https://investorplace.com/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif)
The chips would help in taking down content involving suicide or murder as soon as it is posted. It will also help in reducing energy consumption and substantial compute power required in case of conventional methods.
Hardware Push
The social media giant is joining the ranks of other tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft who are designing chips to fulfill their own requirement.
In April, Bloomberg reported that Facebook is building a team to design its own semiconductors. The company’s job posting for hiring new talent in chip design sparked speculations in the industry. The company was anticipated to build such chips to power its new hardware products or boost its machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) purposes.
Notably, Facebook’s focus on building its own chipsets will make it more self-reliant by reducing dependence on chipmakers like NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) and Qualcomm, Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM). Further, in-house chips will help the company improve on its margins.
Shares of Facebook have gained 4.8% year to date while the industry declined 7.3% over the same time frame.
Building a Better Community
In November 2017, the company expanded its AI efforts to identify users with suicidal motives by recognizing patterns in their posts and live videos.
After being criticized for its Live feature where suicide-related activities were also streamed, the company made investment in AI tools, increased the number of reviewers working on it and brought down the time taken to review those Live videos to less than 10 minutes.
On the last conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the advanced AI tools have also helped them in detecting and removing a number of fake accounts ahead of the elections in France, Germany and Alabama last year. The tools are also instrumental in removing 90% of ISIS and Al Qaeda related terror content even before it is flagged by users.
However, hate speech being dependent on local language is an area where the CEO thinks will “take more years to be able to do something reasonably.” The company is progressing on handling the issue by building an AI system and hiring more people for content review.
Although investments in these may affect profits in the near term, these initiatives are expected to help Facebook build a stronger community in the long haul.
More Stock News: This Is Bigger than the iPhone
It could become the mother of all technological revolutions. Apple sold a mere 1 billion iPhones in 10 years but a new breakthrough is expected to generate more than 27 billion devices in just 3 years, creating a $1.7 trillion market.
Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and 6 tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don’t buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020.