Meta building AI that processes speech & text as humans do

Meta (formerly Facebook) has announced a long-term artificial intelligence (AI) research initiative to better understand how the human brain processes speech and text, and build AI systems that learn like people do.

In collaboration with neuroimaging center Neurospin (CEA) and Inria, Meta said it is comparing how AI language models and the brain respond to the same spoken or written sentences.

"We'll use insights from this work to guide the development of AI that processes speech and text as efficiently as people," the social network said in a statement.

Over the past two years, Meta has applied deep learning techniques to public neuro-imaging data sets to analyse how the brain processes words and sentences.

Children learn that "orange" can refer to both a fruit and colour from a few examples, but modern AI systems can't do this as efficiently as people.

Meta research has found that language models that most resemble brain activity are those that best predict the next word from context (like once upon a... time).

"While the brain anticipates words and ideas far ahead in time, most language models are trained to only predict the very next word," said the company.