Social media giant Facebook is working on two new projects, one of whichwould be a handy tool that would summarize an article so people don’t haveto go through all of it. The other project is more ambitious, as itinvolves a tool that would be able to read someone’s brain and translatetheir thoughts into action.
These announcements were a part of the company’s end of the year meetinglead by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company was able to move forward andmanaged to add more than 20,000 new employees this year. The social networkalso reported record usage during the year due to the pandemic.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said that 2020 was thebusiest year for Facebook after March.
As for the article summarization tool, the company revealed that it wouldbe an AI-powered tool called TLDR, which is an acronym for Too Long Didn’tRead. This would summarize a news article into bullet points so peopledon’t have to read the whole thing. It would also provide audio narrationas well as a voice assistant to answer.
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The brain reading tool does not appear to have a name yet, but it will beable to read commands directly from peoples’ minds. Facebook acquired aneural interface startup CTRL Labs in 2019 and showed its progress in themeeting.
The company is working on a neural sensor that would take neural signalsfrom the brain, down the spinal cord to the arm and wrist, allowing anyoneto take physical action. This could be used for typing, holding a virtualobject, or controlling characters in a video game.
