Facebook parent Meta to build world’s fastest supercomputer to process data

Facebook said it believes the computer will be the fastest in the world once it is fully built around mid-2022.

New York, First Published Jan 25, 2022, 9:23 AM IST | Last Updated Jan 25, 2022, 9:54 AM IST

Mark Zuckerberg has announced his social media empire Facebook’s parent company Meta is building what he claims is the world’s fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer as part of plans to build a virtual metaverse. He said it would boost its capacity to process data, despite persistent disputes over privacy and disinformation.

The Facebook founder said in a blogpost that the metaverse, a concept that blends the physical and digital world via virtual and augmented reality, will require “enormous” computing power. The AI supercomputer, dubbed AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) by Zuckerberg’s Meta business, is already the fifth fastest in the world, the company said.

Meta said in a blog post that its new AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) would help the company build better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, work across hundreds of languages, and analyze text, images and video together to determine if content was harmful.

“This research will not only help keep people safe on our services today, but also in the future, as we build for the metaverse,” the company said in a blog post.

Facebook said it believes the computer will be the fastest in the world once it is fully built around mid-2022.

AI mimics the underlying architecture of the brain in computer form and is capable of processing, and spotting patterns in, vast amounts of data. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and the WhatsApp messaging service, generates significant amounts of data from its 2.8 billion daily users.

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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.

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.

And the AI algorithms that funnel Facebook users towards appealing posts have been criticised for helping to fuel disinformation and hate speech.

Facebook has apologised repeatedly about the adverse effects of its algorithms and has long flagged its investment in content moderators and other measures to tackle problematic posts.

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.

“They are going to, for the first time, put their customer data on their AI research computer,” the blog read. “That would be a really big change to give AI researchers and algorithms access to all that data.”

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