Meta has unveiled the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), a new supercomputer that's among the fastest in the world. And it'll only get faster – by the end of the year it should rank number one, with computing power on the exascale. The company formerly known as Facebook has had its fingers in the AI pie for a few years now, and it's not hard to see why. Through Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp et al, the conglomerate generates far more data than any mere mortal could possibly process – and there's obscene amounts of money to be made in sifting through it all. Meta's RSC will be up to the task, using this data and immense computing power to train AI algorithms to better recognize objects in images and spoken words in audio, quickly translate between languages, and identify harmful content and misinformation that shouldn't be on social media.

The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. Meta, which announced the news in a blog post Monday, said its research team currently is using the supercomputer to train AI models in natural-language processing and computer vision for research. The aim is to boost capabilities to one day train models with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte, which is roughly equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video. "The experiences we're building for the metaverse require enormous compute power…and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal. By mid-summer, when the AI Research SuperCluster is fully built, it will house some 16,000 GPUs, becoming the fastest AI supercomputer in the world, Meta said.