Meta creates powerful Artificial Intelligence Supercomputer

Facebook's parent company Meta announced on Monday it was launching one of the world's most powerful supercomputers to boost its capacity to process data, despite persistent disputes over privacy and disinformation. The US tech giant said the array of machines could process images and video up to 20 times faster than their current systems. "The experiences we're building for the metaverse require enormous compute power (quintillions of operations / second!)," wrote Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook, referring to his idea of a 3D internet where users don virtual reality headsets and sensor equipment to create an immersive experience. The firm envisages developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that will, among other things, allow people speaking in several different languages to understand each other in real-time.

Supercomputers are extremely fast and powerful machines built to do complex calculations not possible with a regular home computer. Meta did not disclose where the computer is located or how much it is costing to build. The computer, which is already up and running but is still being built, is called AI Research SuperCluster (RSC). Meta says it will help its AI researchers build “new and better” artificial intelligence models that can learn from “trillions” of examples and work across hundreds of different languages simultaneously and analyze text, images and video together.

The company said its supercomputer will incorporate “real-world examples” from its own systems into training its AI. It says its previous efforts used only open-source and other publicly available data sets. Platforms like Facebook and Google have long been criticised for the way they process and utilise the data they take from their users. The two firms currently face legal cases across the European Union that allege data transfers from the bloc to the United States are illegal.