Meta bets big on generative AI push by acquiring GPUs, bringing teams closer together

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that the company is bringing its AI research team “closer” to the more business-focused generic AI team it launched last year, doubling down on the emphasis on bringing technology into products.

Zuckerberg said in posts on Meta’s Instagram and Threads platforms that the social media giant was building out its infrastructure to accommodate this pressure and planned to source about 350,000 H100 GPUs (graphics processing units) from chip designer Nvidia. Was.

In combination with equivalent chips from other suppliers, Meta will have a total of about 600,000 GPUs by the end of the year, he said.

This amount will make Meta’s system, once finished, the largest in the technology industry.

A Meta spokesperson declined to reveal which GPU suppliers the company is using besides market leader Nvidia, although it has said publicly that it also plans to use chips from AMD. Reuters has previously reported that work is also underway on an internally designed GPU-like chip.

After years of leading research on the technology through its FAIR team, Meta has struggled over the past year to build out its computing arsenal to support the mobilization around generative AI, but has been able to integrate it into its core social media products. And there has been very little focus on building in AR/VR hardware. equipment.

The company convened a “GenAI” team last year to lead the effort to replace OpenAI’s ChatGPIT chatbot following the runaway success of it in late 2022.

Since then, Meta has launched a commercial version of its Llama large language model, advertising tools that can generate image backgrounds from text prompts and a “Meta AI” chatbot that can be accessed directly through its Ray-Ban smart glasses. May go.

In his post on Thursday, Zuckerberg said that the company is currently training the third version of the Llama model.

He also linked the AI ​​investment to the pivot to an AR/VR-powered metaverse vision, which led him to change the company’s name to Meta in 2021. He said he expects “new devices” like glasses to allow people to interact with AI. Will be required”.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – Reuters)