Facebook’s parent company Meta announced today it is launching one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to boost its capacity to process data, Tech Xplore reports. The U.S. tech giant said the array of machines could process images and video up to 20 times faster than its current systems.
The supercomputer, built from thousands of processors, will be used to “seamlessly analyse text, images, and video together; develop new augmented reality tools; and much more”, the firm said in a blog post written by two of its artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Meta said the machine, known as AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), was already in the top five fastest supercomputers, and would become the fastest AI machine in the world when fully built in the next few months.
Platforms including Facebook and Google have long been criticized for the way they process and utilize the data acquired from 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. And the AI algorithms that funnel Facebook users toward appealing posts have been criticised for helping to fuel disinformation and hate speech.
Today’s blog said that weeding out harmful content was among the “critical use cases” for its AI development. The researchers wrote that high-definition video was creating ever greater demand for processing power at the same time the company was pushing for AI tools based on trillions of examples.
“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,” wrote the researchers. “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.”
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing harder than his big tech rivals to develop the idea of the metaverse, which envisages an immersive 3D internet enabled by virtual reality headsets and sensor equipment.
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-facebook-trumpets-massive-supercomputer.html
