Meta Preps For Metaverse With World’s Fastest Computer

Meta has unveiled the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), a supercomputer that the social media giant says will — by mid-year — be the fastest on earth, and that is designed to help the company enter the metaverse.

“AI can currently perform tasks like translating text between languages and helping identify potentially harmful content, but developing the next generation of AI will require powerful supercomputers capable of quintillions of operations per second,” the Facebook parent firm said in its announcement Monday (Jan. 24).

Meta says RSC will help its AI teams construct better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples and work across hundreds of languages. These models will also analyze text, images and video together and create new augmented reality tools.

“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 said.

While Meta says it has made “significant strides in AI” since 2013, the company needs increasingly large and complex models to fully realize the benefits of AI, particularly when it comes to critical use cases, such as recognizing harmful content.

“In early 2020, we decided the best way to accelerate progress was to design a new computing infrastructure — RSC,” the company said.

RSC will let Meta more quickly train models that employ multimodal signals to see whether an action, sound or image is harmful or benign.

“This research will not only help keep people safe on our services today, but also in the future, as we build for the metaverse. As RSC moves into its next phase, we plan for it to grow bigger and more powerful, as we begin laying the groundwork for the metaverse.”

Read more: Facebook, Instagram Jump Into NFTs, a Springboard to the Metaverse

The news comes less than a week after reports that Meta’s two main social networks, Facebook and Instagram, were entering the nonfungible token (NFT) market.

By allowing Facebook and Instagram users to mint, trade and display NFTs, Meta is both latching onto a lucrative sector of the cryptocurrency market and taking an important step into turning itself into a major metaverse player.