Facebook has taken the wraps off a project called Learning from Videos. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and learn audio, textual, and visual representations in public user videos on the social network.

Learning from Videos has a number of aims, such as improving Facebook AI systems related to content recommendations and policy enforcement. The project is in its early stages, but it's already bearing fruit. Facebook says it has already harnessed the tech to enhance Instagram Reels recommendations, such as surfacing videos of people doing the same dance to the same music. The system is showing improved results in speech recognition errors as well, which could bolster auto-captioning features and make it easier to detect hate speech in videos.

Facebook says the project will help AI researchers avoid having to rely on labeled data and it's part of efforts to build systems that learn in a similar way to humans. As such, Learning from Videos will "enable entirely new experiences." The company didn't go into much detail about those except for a possible feature that would allow AI to find digital memories, including ones captured by augmented reality glasses. You could, for instance, ask such a system to show you "every time we sang to grandma," and it could surface those clips. Facebook, notably, is working on its own smart glasses.

The company says the project is looking at videos in hundreds of languages and from almost every country. This aspect of the project will make AI systems more accurate and allow them to "adapt to our fast moving world and recognize the nuances and visual cues across different cultures and regions."

Facebook says that it's keeping privacy in mind when it comes to Learning from Videos. "We’re building and maintaining a strong privacy foundation that uses automated solutions to enforce privacy at scale," it wrote in a blog post. "By embedding this work at the infrastructure level, we can consistently apply privacy requirements across our systems and support efforts like AI. This includes implementing technical safeguards throughout the data lifecycle."

Understanding what's happening in videos can be an immensely difficult task for AI systems. They can include hurdles like background noise that makes it difficult to understand speech and language switching. Yet less than a year after starting the Learning from Videos project, Facebook is taking what the system has learned and putting it to practical use in other areas.

Facebook is offering creators more options to make money from their audiences. One method it’s testing is a way to make bank from Stories. Some creators will be able to plug ads that look similar to stickers into their Stories and they'll get a cut of ad revenue. For instance, creators might plug local businesses with a sticker while they're on trips.

Only a small number of creators have access to this option during the initial test, but Facebook hopes to roll out the feature in the near future. It also plans to enable the feature for all short-form videos.

Elsewhere, Facebook is bringing mid-roll ads to shorter videos. Until now, ads were only present in videos that were at least three minutes long. You may start to see ads in videos that run for only a minute. Videos lasting between one and three minutes can have ads 30 seconds in. Ads can appear in longer videos after 45 seconds, down from one minute.

Pages will only be able to run ads on shorter videos if they meet certain requirements, like having 600,000 minutes of total watch time in the previous 60 days and at least five active video uploads. Live video creators additionally need to have at least 60,000 minutes of live watch time over the same period to qualify for ads in their streams.

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Facebook is also expanding paid live events to another 24 countries and switching on fan subscriptions in 10 more regions. In addition, it's spending $7 million to promote the Stars virtual tipping currency. As with Twitch Bits, users can send these to creators. Facebook will be giving away Stars during certain live streams. Comments that users send with Stars will be more prominently displayed on streams. You'll be able to send virtual gifts to creators too.

Stars will be available in more markets, and you can check on a creator support site whether your Page is eligible. Soon, Facebook will expand Stars beyond live streams by testing them in on-demand videos. Meanwhile, Facebook has updated the minimum eligibility criteria for gaming creators to become partners and unlock more features and monetization options.