Allana Akhtar

USA TODAY

Facebook is opening up its image-recognition artificial intelligence research to the public.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based tech giant is releasing years’ worth of code and research on “machine vision,” or computer image recognition and understanding, the company announced Thursday.

The aim is to help rapidly advance the field of machine vision as the social network expands on users' interest in sharing and interacting with photos and videos. The company will continue to publish its latest results and update open source tools made available.

“The more the community is using open source code, the faster it is improved and innovated on, which helps expand expertise and adds longevity to projects we feel are very important,” Piotr Dollar, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) research scientist, said to USA TODAY in an e-mail.

Facebook hopes to use AI to eventually search for specific images without an explicit tag on each photo, and enable those with vision loss to understand an image from a system describing it to them.

Like other big tech companies, particularly Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, Facebook is racing to have an edge in artificial intelligence, seen as key to making its ecosystem of services, which include Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, more intertwined with its users' daily lives.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg's 10-year vision for the company relies on major technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and global internet connectivity.

It's also been working on ways to integrate AI to make using the service easier for those with disabilities, such as vision impairment.

Image recognition is notoriously tricky, and the nascent field has experienced some bad stumbles. Last year, Google apologized after its new Photos application, which used machine learning to identify people and places on its own, identified black people as gorillas.

Facebook is no stranger to open source, or releasing software online to be redistributed or modified. On its website, the company has a variety of open sourced software for its Android and iOS apps, web service and the backend infrastructure.

“Facebook has a culture of support for open source hardware and software,” Dollar said. “Progress in science and technology accelerates when scientists and technologists share not just their results, but their tools and methods.”

WHY COMPANIES OPEN SOURCE

Open sourcing code is different than releasing an application program interface (API), or a set of tools for building applications on particular operating systems, explains Lauren Nelson, principal analyst at Forrester.

The code does not come with instructions for developers to build services for, and instead is free code released to help a community of programmers develop software together. Open source comes with the agreement developers may modify and distribute the original code, something that APIs do not allow for.

Open sourcing spurs tech innovation by allowing for a community of programmers to learn from what others are doing with public code, fixing it and building on it as they go.

“There’s something important about the prospect of developing software within a community rather than in a proprietary environment,” Peter Christy, research director at 451 Research, said.

Christy notes a trend in large companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon open sourcing code. A possible benefit from open source is no longer being responsible for the ongoing maintenance of software by allowing the public to do that instead of employees.

“It’s hard to make money from software that’s been open sourced,” Christy said. “The question is whether there are other mitigating circumstances like the ability to build a join community, build things that are bigger than you could, or the ability to move the software faster than you could.”

However, there are benefits to companies open sourcing code aside from cost-saving, Nelsen explains with fellow Forrester analyst Paul Miller in their report, “Open Source Powers Enterprise Digital Transformation.”

Companies have the chance to become the industry standard on a particular tool by perfecting an open tool, the report states. Netflix’s Simian Army blog is a prime example, as the company used Amazon’s cloud service, Amazon Web Services, early and built a reputation of an exemplary cloud-native application building company.

“It’s no longer acceptable to take the traditional, cautious approach to technology adoption,” Nelson states in her report. “As open source options evolve, enterprises see them as a more open and flexible path forward.”