Photo: The Verge
Media magnate Mark Zuckerberg revealed his ambitious plan to build what he called the fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer in history as part of an even larger ambition for building a digital metaverse.
The internet entrepreneur has written in a blog post that we need to prepare for the Metaverse, a digital realm developed through virtual and augmented reality. He says it will require an immense amount of computing power.
Meta says that AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), the AI supercomputer by the tech giant, is the world’s fifth fastest supercomputer thus far.
Zuckerberg wrote in his blog post: “The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute [sic] power (quintillions of operations/second!) and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.”
The researchers at Meta have said that eventually, this new computer could become one of the fastest machines in existence.
One of the most exciting developments in AI is its ability to imitate and mimic human brain function. It’s able to conduct processing and detect patterns among massive numbers of data with ease. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and the WhatsApp messaging service, gets vast amounts of data from its daily users of 2.8 billion.
Meta received a $5 billion dollar fine during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Former worker and whistleblower Frances Haugen warned that they are concentrating on scaling up into new domains instead of putting “more resources on very basic safety systems.”
Meta researchers are confident that the RSC, which is created from thousands of processors and sheltered in an undisclosed location, will help recognize destructive content on its platforms.
The metaverse, which is still on its way to fullness, will be an integral part of Meta’s plans for the computer. Kevin Lee, Meta’s technical program manager, and Shubho Sengupta, software engineer, have mentioned in the blog post that they envision the supercomputer to instantly translate dialogues between gamers from all over the world.
It could enable huge groups of individuals from different countries to play a game established on augmented reality, where the real world overlaps with the digital realm, usually through a user’s phone.
