Meta says it wants to build the most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer in the world. The Facebook owner has already designed and built what it calls the AI Research SuperCluster, or RSC, which it says is among the fastest AI supercomputers in the world. It hopes to top that league by mid-2022, it said, in what would be a major step towards increasing its artificial intelligence capabilities. That is partly focused on the metaverse, which Meta has staked its future on. With that new technology, "AI-driven applications and products will play an important role", it said in its announcement.

Last week, IBM announced, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), some impressive AI performance numbers from the Summit supercomputer. ORNL is hailing Summit as the world's "most powerful and smartest supercomputer" currently in existence, unseating the previous record-holder, a Chinese supercomputer named Sunway TaihuLight. Based on its self-published, mixed precision performance numbers, it is the new AI beast. Summit was designed with 4,608 of IBM's newest generation POWER9 Systems (which I've written previously on here and here) and 27,648 of NVIDIA's Volta GPUs. IBM says this is the first supercomputer to be designed expressly for the purpose of AI which wasn't an accident, by the way- it was by design.

Microsoft is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) with the creation at the end of September of a new AI and Research Group. This newly formed group brings together Microsoft's research organization and more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on AI and is now the fourth major division in the company, on par with the Windows, Office and Cloud divisions. Harnessing AI through agents such as Cortana, the company's digital personal assistant Infusing AI into Skype, Office 365 and every other Microsoft application Making cognitive capabilities such as vision and speech and machine analytics available to external developers Using Azure to build a powerful AI supercomputer in the cloud to provide "AI as a Service" Using Azure to build a powerful AI supercomputer in the cloud to provide "AI as a Service" When Microsoft talks of "infusing" every application with AI, it's reminiscent of the famous "Internet Tidal Wave" email Bill Gates sent to all staff in 1995. In it, Gates outlined his desire to focus the company's efforts on the internet with immediate effect and told them to "assign the internet the highest level of importance" in everything that they did henceforth. Is the creation of the AI and research group effectively a "tidal wave" message?