According to Cointelegraph: Facebook's parent company, Meta, has plans to intensify its push to incorporate generative artificial intelligence (AI) into its products. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on January 18 that the company would be bringing its business-focused generative AI research team "closer together" with its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team.
During the announcement made in a Thread video, Zuckerberg explained the company's commitment to advancing AI technology, including massive investments in specialized computer chips designed to build and deliver new generative AI models and products. As part of this move, the company is already training its next-generation Llama 3 large language model (LLM).
Zuckerberg stated, "It’s become clear that the next generation of services requires building full general intelligence. Building the best AI assistants—AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more—that needs advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.”
In order to accommodate this push, Meta plans on expanding its technology infrastructure, aiming to possess about 350,000 H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) from chipmaker Nvidia by the close of the year.
This strategy of amalgamating AI divisions mirrors Alphabet's tactic in 2023 when it combined its two advanced AI research labs, Google Brain and DeepMind.
Over time, Meta has spearheaded significant AI research, from unsupervised learning to the creation of AI software that combines top human skills in the strategy game Diplomacy, as well as achieving advancements in machine translation and computer vision algorithms. Meta's GenAI team has developed Llama 2, an efficient open-source language model preferred by developers for creating cost-effective and customizable chatbots in comparison to other models.