Facebook's New 'AI Camera' Team Wants to Add a Layer to the World
Take a video of a birthday cake’s candles sparkling in an Instagram story, then tap the sticker button. Near the top of the list you’ll see a slice of birthday cake.
It’s a little thing. This simple trick is not breathtaking nor magical. But it is the beginning of something transformative. Smartphones already changed how most people take pictures. The latest Silicon Valley quest is to reimagine what a camera is, applying the recent progress in artificial intelligence to allow your phone to read the physical world as easily as Google read the web.
With 2 billion users, Facebook has reorganized the teams responsible for coding the camera software in Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger into a new unit it calls “AI Camera.” The group started last year with a single person. Now, it has grown to 60 people. That includes Rick Szeliski and Michael Cohen who worked on Photosynth (among other things) at Microsoft. The AI Camera team also can draw on the expertise of top neural-network researchers like Yann LeCun and Yangqing Jia in other parts of the company.
The AI Camera team is responsible for giving the cameras inside these apps an understanding of what you’re pointing them at. In the near future, your camera will understand its location, recognize the people in the frame, and be able to seamlessly augment the reality you
