Mark Zuckerberg Announces Meta To Increase AI And GPU Research Teams To Expand Technology Use

- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, strengthens the artificial intelligence research team (AI) on Meta. (photo: Instagram @zuck)

JAKARTA - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday January 18 that the company is strengthening an artificial intelligence (AI) research team with a more business-oriented AI generating team, which was launched last year. This confirms Meta's commitment to integrating AI technology into its products.

The social media giant is building infrastructure to support this initiative and plans to have around 350,000 units of H100 GPU (graphics processing units) from chip designer Nvidia by the end of this year, as Zuckerberg revealed in a post on Meta's Instagram and Threads platforms.

With the addition of a similar chip unit from another supplier, Meta plans to have about 600,000 GPU units in total by the end of this year, making Meta's system one of the largest in the tech industry. In comparison, Amazon recently announced that it is building a system with 100,000 Trainium2 chips, while Oracle has activated the system with 32,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

Although Meta did not specify a GPU supplier other than Nvidia, the company has stated its plans to use AMD chips. Previously, it was reported that Meta was developing an internal GPU-like chip.

Meta has been working hard to expand its armedness' in the field of computing to support the mobility around the AI generative in the past year, after several years of doing superior research in technology through its FAIR team, but has not significantly focused on integrating it into major products of social media and AR/VR hardware.

The company formed a "GenAI" team last year to lead efforts to change that after OpenAI's ChatGPT success at the end of 2022. Since then, Meta has launched a commercial version of the Llama big language model, an ad tool that can generate image backgrounds from text requests, and "Meta AI" chatbots that can be accessed directly through Ray-Ban smart glasses.

In a post on Thursday, Zuckerberg said that the company is currently training a third version of the Llama model. He also attributed investment in AI to Meta's vision shift towards an AR/VR-driven metaverse, which inspired the company's name change to Meta in 2021, stating that people "will need new devices" such as glasses to interact with AI.