Dive Brief:

• Facebook is rolling out an artificial intelligence platform called Caffe2Go that can reconfigure smartphone images and videos to look like an artist’s work in real-time — a technique called style transfer — the company said in a blog post. 
• With the significant growth in video as a communication tool, Facebook’s goal for the mobile-first Caffe2Go platform is to make state-of-the-art creative tools widely available on phones.
• Parts of the AI framework will be opened up to developers over the coming months to enhance cross-platform systems.

Dive Insight:

With AI’s role quickly growing in the creation of customer experiences and marketing, Facebook’s Caffe2Go immediately gives the company an important point of differentiation — a platform that brings AI’s capabilities directly onto mobile phones to process data in real-time. This has the potential to significantly speed up AI experiences and, by extension, insert them into more areas of everyday life. Facebook is competing against IBM, Salesforce and others to create meaningful AI experiences. 

Initially, Caffe2Go is focused on processing images, speaking to how consumers are using their phones to create and share photos and videos. With marketers enthusiastic about leveraging user-generated content in their campaigns, Caffe2Go could set the stage for a more unique approach.

Facebook’s new AI platform also has the potential to help marketers build their own creative, reflecting how cognitive learning is already gaining steam in assuming some of marketing’s more mundane tasks.  

Style transfer is a type of image processing that is technically difficult and typically requires the involvement of big servers to process data. Facebook’s deep learning platform condenses the size of the AI model to process images and videos by 100x, enabling it to be embedded into Facebook’s apps. As a result, consumers using the apps and a phone’s camera can capture, analyze and process pixels in real time.

Going forward, Caffe2go will be rolled out across Facebook’s stack and become a core aspect of its machine learning products.

Facebook said Caffe2Go is an example of its commitment to bringing users more AI and AR experiences like being able to apply Van Gogh’s brush style when shooting a video. The company expects that having AI running in real time on a mobile device could drive valuable connected experiences for people in areas like accessibility, education and others.