NEW YORK: Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms today released an artificial intelligence model capable of translating and transcribing speech in dozens of languages, a potential building block for tools enabling real-time communication across language divides.
Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has said he envisions such tools facilitating interactions between users from around the globe in the metaverse, the set of interconnected virtual worlds on which he is betting the company’s future.The world’s biggest social media company has released a flurry of mostly free AI models this year, including a large language model called Llama that poses a serious challenge to proprietary models sold by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google.
Nonetheless, Meta faces similar legal questions as the rest of the industry around the training data ingested to create its models.