Facebook joins race for AI chips: Facebook is playing catch up to Amazon and Google in developing chips that can handle the upcoming generation of AI technology, writes the FT. The social network’s AI goals are twofold: to imbue a computer with enough common sense to hold a conversation with a human and to use AI to monitor video in real-time and decide what content is fit to be disseminated. Let’s hope this doesn’t become a Nazi-bot like Twitter’s AI bot.

Inside job: Facebook is working with a number of chip companies but also developing the technology on its own. This isn’t unprecedented — Facebook has previously designed hardware before opening up those designs to open source. In addition to working on reducing latency, the focus is on building new “self-supervised” neural networks that mimic human intelligence more closely. The field is crowded, with not only Amazon and Google investing heavily in AI chips, but a plethora of startups as well. Historically, breakthroughs in AI were enabled only by big hardware improvements, so the tech giants’ spending spree could do a lot to push the science forward.