Facebook Says It’s Developing a Tool That Could Read Your Brain; and AI Tool to Summarise News Articles: Report

Facebook is planning on building a neural sensor that will be able to detect people's thoughts and translate them into action, as per a report. Facebook held a year-end meeting with its employees on Tuesday, where the company told its employees about plans for 2021 and demonstrated new technology. Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer reportedly detailed the neural sensor which could read commands from people's brains. The report stated that Facebook is also developing a tool called “TL;DR” that would summarise news articles with the help of AI, so that users don't have to read the full piece.

The social media giant's internal meeting was not public, but BuzzFeed News said in a report that it obtained audio of the meeting. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg led the meeting, which was broadcast virtually to the company's employees. In the meeting, several new technologies were demonstrated.

TL;DR, the acronym for ‘too long, didn't read,' will reportedly be the name of an AI assistant that will summarise news articles in bullet points. The tool could also be offering audio narration of articles and a voice assistant to ask questions about a piece, noted the report.

Facebook also reportedly demonstrated a neural sensor device that would be able to detect people's thoughts and translate them into inputs. The company's Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said, according to the report, that the sensor takes “neural signals coming from my brain, down my spinal cord along my arm, to my wrist,” where this sensor detects and interprets them, and allows users to make a physical action.

Schroepfer reportedly said that the neural sensor could be used for typing, holding a virtual object, or controlling a video game.

As per the report, the CTO also noted that Facebook's data centers were receiving new systems, which would make them 10 to 30 times faster and allow the company's AI to train itself.

“Horizon” was another projected mentioned by Schroepfer in the meeting, according to the report. It is aimed to be a new virtual reality kind of social media, where users will be able to ‘hang out' with their avatars in VR. A universal voice translator that will let people to communicate across different languages and a tech called FaceGen that would allow video chatting in bad connectivity environments were also mentioned.

Are iPhone 12 mini, HomePod mini the Perfect Apple Devices for India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.