By Natalie Mojica
Meta, previously known as Facebook, introduced a new computing infrastructure–AI Research SuperCluster to accelerate its AI research and build a metaverse quicker.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to streamline the social media company as Meta in October of 2021. Meta aims to create a virtual environment where consumers feel more tied to their online lives.
“The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this,” Zuckerberg said.
Through Meta, consumers will be able to engage in online concerts, shopping experiences, even trips from the comfort of their home through the metaverse–at least that’s the goal for making the metaverse mainstream and accessible within five to ten years.
To achieve this goal, Meta aims to have the fastest supercomputer built by mid-2022 to advance AI models and their ability to learn and self-correct different operations and analyze text, images, and videos together.
“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 company said in its press release.
AI supercomputers are the fastest computers globally, made up of memory and process cores that use more than one central processing unit to solve complex problems with a variety of applications. According to IBM, supercomputers can advance cancer research, identify better building materials, understand disease patterns, etc.…
As for how supercomputers can help Meta, one of the foremost exciting applications for AI in the social technology landscape is its ability to identify harmful content posted. With the fast way content creation moves in social media, engineers are constantly looking for the best way to filter and remove hateful content from being shared with millions of users.
The latest AI technology created to remedy this problem developed by Meta is called Few-Shot Learner. It works in about a hundred languages and constantly learns policies to act on harmful posts quicker than ever–taking weeks to do a job that would typically take months.
As social media advances and becomes a part of everyday life for the average American, it’s increasingly important that these platforms don’t become vessels for spreading misinformation or are used to endanger people’s lives. Internet safety is more instrumental now more than ever, especially with the possibility of augmented reality joining the sphere of social technology.
While all these advancements are fascinating, the metaverse remains a vast, unexplored space for tech companies everywhere to experiment. Companies like Microsoft and Epic Games have also recently laid out plans for future metaverse development. However, data shows many consumers are either confused or uninterested in the concept of a metaverse entirely. This past August, Forrester surveyed online adult consumers and revealed that less than 23% of U.S.-based respondents “would like to spend some time exploring the metaverse.” A majority of those surveyed were more convinced that there wasn’t a need for it in their lives, hinting that despite the technological advancements made by the existence of a metaverse, many don’t see it being relevant to their quality of life at all.
