Meta’s Pricey Bet on AI Comes With New Custom Chips, Coder Tools
In Meta Platforms Inc.'s year of cost cutting and layoffs, there's one area that's seeing record spending: an update of the social media giant's infrastructure to keep pace in the artificial intelligence arms race.
On Thursday, the Facebook owner unveiled a slew of new technologies, including a new chip developed in-house to help train AI faster, and a tool that helps coders get suggestions for how to build their products. The company is also revamping its data centers to make it easier to deploy AI technology.
“This work reflects long term efforts that will enable even more advances and better use of this technology across everything we do,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in an emailed statement.
The custom accelerator chip will help speed up the recommendation algorithm that powers what people see on Facebook and Instagram. A new data center design is being rolled out specifically for hardware that's best for AI. Meta said it has also finished the second phase of building its AI supercomputer to train large language models, which are technologies similar to those that power ChatGPT.
Meta's capital expenditures hit a record $31.4 billion last year, more than four-and-a-half times the amount in 2017. This year, which Zuckerberg has called Meta's “year of efficiency,” analysts expect a repeat of 2022's levels, with many of those dollars going toward improving and expanding AI infrastructure.
“There is a little bit of tension” with the efficiency mandate, “but it's not in direct competition to be investing in AI and also investing in efficiency,” said Kim Hazelwood, director of AI research at Meta.
Some of the AI updates are obvious drivers of efficiency within Meta, which has eliminated thousands of employees in
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