Facebook is keen on developing its own artificial intelligence chips to achieve breakthroughs like a digital assistant with “common sense”, according to a report by The Financial Times.

“Facebook has been known to build its hardware when required — build its own ASIC, for instance. If there’s any stone unturned, we’re going to work on it,” Facebook’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun was quoted as saying.

In another interview with VentureBeat, LeCun stated that deep learning may need a new programming language that’s more flexible and easier to work with than Python. He also talked about the need for hardware designed specifically for deep learning.

“The kind of hardware that’s available has a big influence on the kind of research that people do, and so the direction of AI in the next decade or so is going to be greatly influenced by what hardware becomes available,” he explained.

Tech giants like Amazon, Google and Intel are already part of the AI chip race. Looks like the social networking giant will jump on the bandwagon sooner than later.