Meta is building the 'world's fastest AI SUPERCOMPUTER'

Meta is building the 'world's fastest AI supercomputer' to help Facebook in its transformation into a 'metaverse', it has announced today. 

The new supercomputer, called the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), will be the fastest supercomputer in the world when it's fully built by mid 2022, according to the tech giant. 

RSC will pave the way toward building technology for 'the next major computing platform' – the metaverse.

Facebook (the company, not the product) renamed itself Meta in October, as part of its long-term project to turn its social media platform into a metaverse. 

In the future, the social media platform will be accessible within the metaverse using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets and smart glasses.   

According to Meta, RSC will help its researchers build better AI models that can work across hundreds of different languages, develop new AR tools and seamlessly analyse text, images and video simultaneously. 

This could enable new AI systems that can power real-time voice translations to large groups of people in the metaverse, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together.  

In a blog published today, Kevin Lee, Meta's director of product management, and Shubho Sengupta, a software engineer for AI Research, said the new supercomputer is already partly operational but will be fully built by the middle of this year.

MailOnline has contacted Meta regarding its exact location.   

With RSC, an AI model with tens of billions of parameters can finish training in three weeks - a third of the time it currently takes with Meta's infrastructure. 

'Developing the next generation of advanced AI will require powerful new computers capable of quintillions of operations per second,' Meta explained.

'Today, Meta is announcing that we've designed and built the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) – which we believe is among the fastest AI supercomputers running today and will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the world when it's fully built out in mid-2022.

'We wanted this infrastructure to be able to train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte – which, to provide a sense of scale, is the equivalent of 36,000 years of high-quality video.'

Meta researchers have already started using RSC to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision for research, they say. 

NLP involves building machines that understand and respond to text or voice data, and respond with text or speech of their own - just like humans do.