Social media platform Facebook is unveiling a new and improved marketplace of sorts powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The platform is called GrokNet, a universal product recognition model that leverages AI technology to crawl Facebook for a more effective and efficient way of identifying goods.
The company’s announcement comes hand-in-hand as it launched Facebook Shops, a digital storefront allowing customers to browse their feeds and shop directly using Facebook or Instagram.
GrokNet is a product recognition system that is geared towards making “virtually any photo shoppable.” This AI model makes it possible to “shop any photo” by using advanced computer technologies to scan the details of the product, such as its fine-grained attributes, and compare it against billions of images.
Today, GrokNet is currently being utilized in a number of Facebook platforms, including Marketplace. The marketplace is the peer-to-peer shopping platform that uses this AI technology to auto-tag certain product features, making it easier to become visible and searchable in the said platform.
In a statement, Facebook head of Applied Computer Vision, Manohar Paluri, said, “We want to make anything and everything on the platform shoppable, whenever the experience feels right.”
In attempts to achieve these goals, Forbes reports that the social media platform has acquired the services of GrokStyle in 2019, a start-up company founded by Alexa co-creator Sean Bell.
In training its system, The Verge notes that GrokNet used a massive scale of approximately 100 million images, with most taken from Marketplace photos. This conditions the system into identifying products despite being placed in a variety of lighting settings and conditions, as well as different angles.
In addition to these, the social media platform has also developed an advanced system of segmentation, the process which identifies which pixels belong to specific goods or objects. Part of its development is the Instance Mask Projection, which can peer through obstructions or layers.
As such, this segmentation process allows for more accurate identification of an object, especially clothing items. ZD Net states that the company has since achieved 80 percent accuracy in this particular aspect.
Apart from helping automatically enabling product tagging on Facebook Pages and items, this artificial intelligence tool has the capacity to help businesses evolve towards a more marketable sector.
In the same way, this tool hopes to make it more convenient and accessible for shoppers and consumers alike to find products that appeal to them.
Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a live video stream last Tuesday, May 19, 2020, that “Facebook is uniquely positioned to be a champion for small businesses and what helps them grow and what keeps them healthy.”
