Facebook will build metaverse with startup that had US military contracts

An artificial intelligence company hired to develop intelligence and navigation capabilities for the US Department of Defense will now be used by Facebook to build the metaverse.

Facebook, which was recently renamed Meta, acquired synthetic data startup AI. Reverie in August, and consolidated it with its Reality Labs division, dedicated to building a shared virtual world.

In January, the startup signed a three-year contract to provide services worth up to US$950 million (BRL 5.4 billion) to the US Air Force, to develop an advanced battle management system and improve its systems of command and control using AI. The contract ended in August, when the company was acquired by Meta.

Meta said the partnership will accelerate the company’s synthetic data capabilities — simulated versions of real-world data needed to train advanced machine learning algorithms — that it will use to build the metaverse.

The former chief executive of AI. Reverie, Daeil Kim, who is now Meta’s director of engineering, described the company as creating “a virtually infinite stock of annotated images and videos to accelerate computer vision and machine learning while reducing the cost of training.”

Earlier this year, the startup said it licensed its synthetic data generation platform to defense, commerce, industry and agriculture customers and tripled its customer base by 2020.

Along with her most recent Air Force contract, she won a contract in May of last year to improve information gathering for the Department of Defense, including the Army and Air Force, and in July 2020 she received another Air Force contract. to improve navigation capabilities in difficult terrain using synthetic training data.

According to AI. Reverie, his artificial intelligence product would support the 7th Bombardment Wing, part of a major air force command unit that conducts nuclear deterrence and global attack operations.

The Air Force’s $950 million ($5.4 billion) contract was “closed for convenience” in early August, which a Meta spokesman confirmed was a few weeks before its acquisition by AI. Reverie. The company also said that Meta will not be involved in any future defense or military AI development.

When Meta replaced the Facebook brand in October, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told technology bulletin Stratechery that virtual reality will begin to outperform laptops and computers for “almost all use cases” by 2030, “or even midway through of this decade”. The metaverse infrastructure, however, is still in its infancy.

Companies like Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and others are competing to lay the foundations for these hyper-reality worlds, which require millions of users to have persistent, simultaneous experiences in real and virtual environments.

In November, Nvidia announced a new synthetic data engine to generate realistic autonomous vehicles and robots that can be trained in their virtual worlds, prior to its real-world launch.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves