Meta: 'World's Fastest Computer' Coming This Summer
Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), the company that was known as Facebook until its recent rebranding in light of a new focus on the metaverse, introduced its AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) yesterday. It is touting this as being the worlds fastest AI supercomputer or at least it could be, once it is completed. With this supercomputer, the company aims to accelerate AI research as it helps build for the metaverse.
RSC will help us build new and better AI models, work across hundreds of different languages, develop new augmented reality tools and more, the company said in a press release. Today were introducing the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), which we believe is among the fastest AI supercomputers running today and will be the fastest in the world once fully built out in mid-2022. AI can currently perform tasks like translating text between languages and helping identify potentially harmful content, but developing the next generation of AI will require powerful supercomputers capable of quintillions of operations per second."
RSC will help Metas AI researchers build better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, work across hundreds of different languages, seamlessly analyze text, images and video together, develop new augmented reality tools and more. Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role.
The company finished trading yesterday at $308.71, up 1.83%, or $5.54 per share. After hours, it dropped to $305.02, down 1.20%. The following day, the stock continued falling, so it seems investors are not too enthusiastic about the news. Overall, the market remains doubtful of the future prospects of the metaverse.
Since 2013, the company noted, we have been making significant strides in AI, including self-supervised learning, where algorithms can learn from vast numbers of unlabeled examples and transformers, which allow AI models to reason more effectively by focusing on certain areas of their input. To fully realize the benefits of advanced AI, various domains, whether vision, speech, language, will require training increasingly large and complex models, especially for critical use cases like identifying harmful content. In early 2020, we decided the best way to accelerate progress was to design a new computing infrastructure - RSC.
With RSC, Meta said it can more quickly train models that use multimodal signals to determine whether an action, sound or image is harmful or benign. This research will not only help keep people safe on its services today, but also in the future, as we build for the metaverse. As RSC moves into its next phase, it is expected to grow bigger and more powerful, as we begin laying the groundwork for the metaverse.
The experiences were building for the metaverse require enormous compute power and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal.
By mid-summer, when the AI Research SuperCluster is fully built, it will house some 16,000 GPUs, becoming the fastest AI supercomputer in the world, the Journal added. Metas AI supercomputer houses 6,080 Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) graphics-processing units, putting it fifth among the fastest supercomputers in the world, according to the company.
If you thought it took a lot of compute and storage to build Facebooks social network, you aint seen nothing yet, noted NextPlatform. The immersive and AI-enhanced experiences of the Metaverse will make all of the technology that Facebook has created to date, and largely open sourced through the Open Compute Project, seem like childs play.
This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
