Facebook acquires London-based AI firm to help it better understand human speech

Facebook announced today that it's acquired London-based artificial intelligence firm Bloomsbury AI, which specializes in natural language processing. According to a post from the official Facebook Academics page, the company says Bloomsbury's "expertise will strengthen Facebook's efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications." In other words, as Facebook continues to hand more platform moderation duties over to algorithms, the underlying AI technology behind those algorithms still has a long way to go. TechCrunch originally reported on the acquisition yesterday.

In the AI community, Facebook is one of the biggest players, with positions at the company's Facebook AI...

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