Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has introduced a new AI model to the world that can identify objects in an image. The newly developed AI model is known as the “Segment Anything Model” (SAM for short) and can understand objects inside images and videos.
The ability to detect specific objects is called segmentation, and Meta seems to be democratizing its AI development for analyzing objects on ocean floors, various underwater photography sceneries, space, and country borders.
According to the press release made by Meta last week, the accurate segmentation technology is an AI-trained infrastructure model induced with large amounts of data to perform specialized tasks.
The WhatsApp parent company says that SAM and its Segment Anything 1-billion mask dataset (SA-1B) are available under a permissive open-license framework for research, and the dataset has approximately 11 million licensed and privacy-preserving images in its final dataset.
Now, the big question is, what if this technology falls into the wrong hands? Criminals can use this tech to find out objects and things from selfie photos taken in bedrooms and restrooms by celebrities and then blackmail them.
NOTE – Irrelevant to the article topic, we have received info that the social media networking giant is planning to start a fresh round of layoffs. In this layoff spree, about 4,000-4,500 employees across the world can receive the “pink slip,” starting from April 20th of this year. Mostly, those working in the technical departments of FB, Instagram, Reality Labs, and WhatsApp will be affected. Those involved in various AI projects are safe for now, and new hirings are on the horizon. American news resource Vox was the first to report this development and expects that the layoff email will be sent to employees in the early hours of Thursday between 4:00 am to 5:00 am. This was an expected move, especially after the Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in March this year that his company intended to eliminate around 10,000 jobs in the next 3 months. Interestingly, in February this year, Amazon announced its plan to lay off around 9,000 employees and is anticipated to divert the investments to the development of AI models.
