Facebook Keeps Working on In-house Chip Designs
Facebook is working on designing computer-chips that are more energy-efficient at analyzing and filtering live video content, the company's chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun said.
"Let's imagine someone uses Facebook Live to film their own suicide or murder. You'd like to be able to take down that kind of content as it happens," LeCun said Friday in Paris.
Conventional computers would require a huge amount of compute power in roder to to monitor every video that appears on the social network.
"There's a huge drive to design chips that are more energy-efficient for that. A large number of companies are working on this, including Facebook," LeCun said, speaking at the Viva Technology industry conference in the French capital. "You've seen that trend from hardware companies like Intel, Samsung, Nvidia. But now you start seeing people lower in the pipeline of usage having their own needs and working on their own hardware."
Facebook already makes its own server design, motherboards, its own communications chips for data centers.
Previous reports suggested that Facebook has a team of chip designers that could help the company supply itself weith tailored chips.