WELCOME to the future. This photo, which has been widely mocked on the internet for its dystopian look, shows Mark Zuckerberg making a surprise appearance as Samsung launched its new smartphone last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. All attendees were given Samsung VR headsets to watch the keynote address.
As well as talking up virtual reality, Facebook used the conference to announce a breakthrough in mapping. After training on just 8000 human-labelled satellite photos from a single country, its AI software scanned through billions of images of Earth taken by satellite, picking out houses and roads, to build a digital map of 20 countries in only two weeks. It analysed 21.6 million square kilometres in all. Human mappers use a similar process, but what takes them weeks took Facebook鈥檚 AI seconds.
The social network wants to build a map to help plan how to deliver the internet to people who are currently offline.
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This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淔acebook鈥檚 future鈥�