Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg is redirecting Meta-wide efforts to build artificial general intelligence and wants to secure a whopping 350,000 or more Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of the year to make that happen.
This comes as OpenAI reportedly signaled it wants to raise billions of dollars in funding to build a network of chip fabs to supply enough AI accelerators to meet its needs. With the Facebook empire looking to vacuum up more than a third of a million Nvidia GPUs alone, we can see why the ChatGPT house is super keen on more factories to churn out processors.
Zuck’s boffins are right now training Llama 3, their latest content-generating large language model, and plan on releasing it openly, the billionaire confirmed Thursday via Instagram. Under Zuckerberg’s vision, Meta’s Fundamental AI Research and Generative AI teams will work more closely together to develop core capabilities needed to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
“It’s become clear that the next generation of services requires building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more needs advances in every area, from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities,” he said.
Zuckerberg is the latest CEO to throw his hat in the ring in the race to build AGI, a theoretical technology that can outperform humans in many cognitive tasks. Training increasingly powerful models needed for AGI to become more than a pipe dream requires huge amounts of accelerators, and Zuckerberg said Meta intends to amass 350,000 H100s for the task.
That’s not all: Meta will reportedly use other types of chips to achieve a total computing power equivalent to 600,000 H100s using a variety of GPUs. It’s even working on its own AI silicon.
Unlike some other orgs pursuing AGI, Meta is planning to openly share its efforts and has vowed to release its models for other developers to use. And Zuckerberg hasn’t quite turned his back on that whole Metaverse and VR headset thing. Instead, he opined AGI will help build and fill out the project’s interconnected worlds of 3D virtual reality, as the corporation has previously indicated when asked whether the CEO has given up on it in favor of artificial intelligence.
“People are also going to need new devices for AI and this brings together AI and the Metaverse over time. I think a lot of us are going to talk to AIs frequently throughout the day. And I think a lot of us are going to do that using glasses. Glasses are the ideal form factor for letting an AI see what you see and hear what you hear,” he predicted.
Last year, Meta launched Ray-Ban smart glasses in partnership with eyewear conglomerate EssilorLuxottica, which each contain a camera, speaker, and microphone. For $299, wearers can activate and chat with an AI assistant, and Zuck claimed they were off to a “very strong start.” ®
