Meta says its new AI supercomputer will be the world's fastest by mid-2022

Meta has completed the first phase of a new AI supercomputer. Once the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) is fully built out later this year, the company believes it will be the fastest AI supercomputer on the planet, capable of "performing at nearly 5 exaflops of mixed precision compute." The company says RSC will help researchers develop better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples. Among other things, the models will be able to build better augmented reality tools and "seamlessly analyze text, images and video together," according to Meta. Much of this work is in service of its vision for the metaverse, in which it says AI-powered apps and products will have a key role. "We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together," technical program manager Kevin Lee and software engineer Shubho Sengupta wrote in a blog post.