Meta Says its New AI Supercomputer Will be Fastest in the World

Meta says that its new AI supercomputer project is underway and that it will be the fastest technology of its kind before the end of 2022.

The AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) is set for completion by mid-2022 and the tech giant predicts that it won’t have any catching up to do. Meta says that the RSC will aid researchers in creating AI that learns from trillions of examples.  The company predicts that these models will be able to “seamlessly analyze text, images, and video together.”

“We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together,” Meta’s technical program manager Kevin Lee and software engineer Shubho Sengupta wrote.

The company aims to train its AI models to sift through content posted to the company’s social media products like Facebook and Instagram, with an eventual application in the metaverse. The AI models will decide whether content on the platforms is “harmful or benign.”

Meta hopes to more than double its AI training performance. Their initial goal upon founding the project in 2020 was to train an AI on an exabyte of information — the equivalent of 1 billion gigabytes.

“We expect such a step function change in compute capability to enable us not only to create more accurate AI models for our existing services but also to enable completely new user experiences, especially in the metaverse,” the pair added.

Facebook’s rebrand to Meta

Facebook unveiled its plan to move past standard social media sites and into the realm of virtual reality with its “metaverse” platform during its Connect Conference last month.

The metaverse (or “Horizon Home,” in its personal version) involves users working, gaming, and communicating in a virtual world with the use of VR headsets.

Mark Zuckerberg, who has spearheaded the shift toward virtual reality, recently announced that the company would hire 10,000 skilled workers from the EU to help construct the metaverse platform.

“The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities. And Europeans will be shaping it right from the start,” Facebook said in a blog post.

The new jobs being created over the next five years will include “highly specialized engineers,” the company said. Facebook has made building the metaverse one of its major priorities.

Investing in the EU offered many advantages, including access to a large consumer market, first-class universities, and high-quality talent, Facebook said in its metaverse announcement.