Introducing Facebook M!

Yesterday had Facebook introducing her own personal assistant; a super duper AI which she calls “M.” In a Facebook post, Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus spoke a bit about Facebook’s plans:

Today we’re beginning to test a new service called M. M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.

Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more.

This is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service. But it’s an exciting step towards enabling people on Messenger to get things done across a variety of things, so they can get more time to focus on what’s important in their lives.

Since Marcus joined Facebook, the Messenger product has been on lightspeed mode when it comes to development. Whether it be payments or a standalone site, the product seems like it’s getting way more attention than it ever has.

Apple has Siri, Google has Google Now, Microsoft has Cortana and Facebook has M. These companies are using the data that you’ve put into the service to help you out or suggest things based on what it knows about you. Putting the assistant inside of Messenger is smart, because people are used to tapping out messages to people, rather than speak commands like its competitors sometimes require.

Siri kinda sucks; So often, she has no clue what you’re saying. And when she does, there’s a pretty good chance she’ll reply with nothing but a page filled with Internet links.

Part of the problem is that Apple’s talking digital assistant is built on old technology. But even if the company upgrades Siri to the latest in artificial intelligence, she’ll fall well short of an assistant made of flesh, blood, and neurons. As far as artificial intelligence has come in the last few years, it’s still a long way from intelligence.

With M, its new virtual assistant, Facebook admits as much.

Built atop Facebook Messenger—the company’s instant messaging app—M made its debut yesterday morning, arriving on the phones of a few hundred unsuspecting souls in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, it’s the company’s answer to Siri and similar services like Google Now and Microsoft Cortana. But it tackles a broader range of tasks, at least as Facebook describes it. You can ask M questions along the lines of Can you make me dinner reservations? or even Can you help me plan my next vacation?—and it will comply.

The acquisition of Wit.ai back in January feeds the human side of the project, the “trained and supervised by people” part mentioned by Marcus.

While Google and Apple were caught up in the pure science of artificial intelligence, Facebook decided to brute force the development of a personal assistant with a bunch of human helpers.

Facebook designed the tool so that AI technology responds to these questions in tandem with humans. “The AI tries to do everything,” says Alex Lebrun, the founder of Wit.ai, a startup Facebook acquired to help build this smartphone tool. “But the AI is supervised by the people.”

In the larger world of AI-driven personal assistants, M may seem like a regression. And as Facebook tests the tool with the public, it’s unclear whether this human-machine partnership can keep pace as the project expands to an ever-larger audience. But in a counterintuitive way, M may actually be a step forward for AI.

The idea is that humans will not only answer queries the AI is incapable of answering but, in the long run, help to improve this AI. Today’s artificial intelligence, you see, requires at least some human training. If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like. They must tag all sorts of feline photos. They must provide data. Through the human staff backing M, Facebook is doing this type of thing in unusually complex ways. “This is why we have this big team of people,” Lebrun says. “The data we need is nonexistent.”

In answering your questions, these humans will provide the data needed to bootstrap a much more sophisticated digital assistant based on a separate form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning.” This could take many years. But such is the way with AI. “Human-level AI is a good philosophical discussion to have,” says Dennis Mortensen, the CEO and founder of x.ai, a startup offering an online personal assistant that automatically schedules meetings, “but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

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