#Zuckerberg says Meta made ‘mistakes’ in AI workforce shift. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told employees that the social media giant has made mistakes in its AI transformation of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

Zuckerberg is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as he seeks to reshape his company’s inner workings around the technology, reflecting a broader pattern among major ​U.S. companies this ​year, particularly in the tech sector.

In the memo, Zuckerberg describes the rapid advances in AI and the challenges brought on by the boom in the technology.

“Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” Zuckerberg said, adding that he is also “focused on providing as much stability as possible” in terms of organization changes going forward.

“I don’t want to overpromise because the world is changing in ways that are out of our control,” he said, reiterating that Meta does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year.

He said Meta will try to find new roles for employees reassigned to train AI models, after the Facebook owner carried out a massive restructuring in May, laying off 10 per cent of its workforce globally and transferring 7,000 employees to new initiatives related to AI workflows.

“By creating important new roles for people, this also allowed us to shrink the size of teams knowing that if we make mistakes in some places, then we could transfer some people back,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta declined to comment on the memo when contacted by Reuters.

The company plans to increase investment in team-building initiatives, Zuckerberg said, including higher budgets for offsites and corporate events, and is organizing a large-scale hackathon in July to foster cross-team collaboration and development on its latest models.

Zuckerberg said Meta has taken note of concerns over the widening of manager oversight responsibilities and plans to scale back the practice.

Meta’s new Applied AI Engineering unit reportedly had a flat structure with up to 50:1 ratio of individual contributors to managers.

In April, Meta raised its annual capital spending forecast to between US$125 billion and $145 billion.

#Software firm emerges as an #AI winner just two years after an LME

#Tech: Introducing Argus, a robot with 20 legs and eyes built to move and see in any direction instantly.

Instead of trying to copy symmetrical shapes from nature by building robots that look like people, dogs or insects, engineering professor Boyuan Chen and his team focused on uniformity in action, or what he calls “dynamic symmetry.”

The result was Argus. The roly-poly robot named after a mythological many-eyed giant has depth-sensing cameras attached to 20 telescoping legs that radiate from a central core. With no front, back, top or bottom, it can see and move in any direction instantly.

“Instead of measuring how your legs are arranged around a different part of your body, we’re measuring how fast you can move in any direction,” Chen said. “Who said, you know, if you have a robot to help us in a most effective way, it has to look like us?”

In experiments, Argus has navigated sandy beaches and forest undergrowth, rolling over obstacles and stabilizing itself after being pushed. It can climb between parallel brick walls by alternating bracing and thrusting motions with its legs. If one or more motor dies or a leg breaks, it continues to function.

“Watching Argus move is unlike watching any other robot we’ve worked with,” said Jiaxun Liu, a graduate student and co-author of a study about Argus published online Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. “The first time we saw it navigate among trees and rough terrain, even under heavy collisions, we knew this was something different.”

As part of their work, researchers developed a new design principle called dynamic isotropy that rates robots on a scale of 0 to 1 based on how uniformly they can accelerate in every direction. Most robots in use today, including humanoids and drones, score below 0.6. Argus scores 0.91.

“When a robot can accelerate equally well in every direction, it stops needing to face the world in any particular way,” said Chen, who hopes the same principle could guide the development of search and rescue robots, underwater or aerial vehicles or robots with the ability to grip objects.

“Instead of building a robot hand that looks like a human hand … one idea is to think about having Argus be the hand itself, and it can manipulate objects in any direction,” he said. “The knowledge we can transfer to the rest of the world is much more deeper than building an existing robot or copying an existing species.”

Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire.

Allen G. Breed And Holly Ramer, The Associated Press

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