Why did Facebook create one of the world's largest AI research labs - and hire Yann LeCun to lead it?
Zuckerberg wanted AI that could truly understand photos, language, and human behavior at Facebook scale.
The answer
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) was established in December 2013, with Yann LeCun - a Turing Award-winning pioneer of convolutional neural networks - appointed as its founding director. LeCun built the lab with locations in New York, Menlo Park, Paris, Montreal, London, and Tel Aviv, recruiting top researchers with the promise of open publication and academic freedom. FAIR became known for releasing major open-source tools including PyTorch (2016, now the most popular deep learning framework in research), fastText, and Detectron, as well as foundational research in self-supervised learning, computer vision, and natural language understanding. The lab's commitment to open research made it one of the most prolific publishers of influential AI papers.
Source: Meta AI
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