- Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday dished particulars about Meta’s ongoing AI efforts and plans.
- The CEO specified what number of GPUs the corporate could have by the top of the 12 months.
- At an estimated value of about $30,000 per GPU, the expense to Meta is eye-popping.
Some individuals brag about their fancy homes. Others drive costly vehicles or sail large yachts. The most recent flex in Silicon Valley is to inform individuals what number of AI chips you personal.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg upped the ante this week by disclosing what number of of those graphics processing models Meta could have by the top of 2024. The invoice for all this might be as excessive as $18 billion, primarily based on business estimates.
“We’re constructing a completely huge quantity of infrastructure” to help Meta’s burgeoning efforts in generative synthetic intelligence, Zuckerberg defined in a transient video launched Thursday.
The corporate is constructing of “normal intelligence” to help AI instruments which might be “obtainable and helpful to everybody in all of our every day lives,” he added.
To that finish, Meta could have bought about 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the top of 2024. And total the corporate will personal roughly 600,000 of a lot of these chips, in case you embody different related GPUs, Zuckerberg famous.
He even gave an interview to The Verge, reiterating that when its Nvidia parts and different AI chips are accounted for, Meta could have a stockpile of virtually 600,000 GPUs by the top of this 12 months. “We’ve constructed up the capability to do that at a scale that could be bigger than some other particular person firm,” he crowed.
GPUs allow the extent of computing crucial for coaching the large fashions that help generative AI companies equivalent to ChatGPT. Nvidia’s GPUs are thought-about one of the best for the time being, however different firms together with AMD supply related chips.
A single Nvidia H100 GPU is estimated to value about $30,000 though different estimates put the fee as excessive as $40,000. If Meta amasses 600,000 of those, that will value $18 billion. Meta is likely to be getting a quantity low cost. And related GPUs from different suppliers could also be cheaper than Nvidia’s choices. However even at $20,000 every, that is $12 billion.
Huge spending repeated
If this rings a bell, it ought to. In 2022, Meta spent about $13 billion on Actuality Labs, its metaverse division. Zuckerberg famous in Thursday’s video that Meta’s AI and metaverse initiatives are coming nearer collectively given his expectation that AR-style glasses with AI, like Meta’s Ray-Bans, might be how individuals sooner or later “discuss to AIs incessantly all through the day.”
In the meantime, Meta continues to push Zuckerberg’s “effectivity” mantra. Since late 2022, the corporate has reduce over 20% of its workforce. Staff anticipate much more cuts within the weeks forward, as Enterprise Insider reported. A broader restructuring hit AI groups final 12 months, too. The corporate will report full-year outcomes for 2023 on Feb. 1.
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