Social media conglomerate Meta is the latest tech company to build an “AI supercomputer” — a high-speed computer designed specifically to train machine learning systems. The company says its new AI Research SuperCluster, or RSC, is already among the fastest machines of its type and, when complete in mid-2022, will be the world’s fastest.
… The news demonstrates the absolute centrality of AI research to companies like Meta. Rivals like Microsoft and Nvidia have already announced their own “AI supercomputers,” which are slightly different from what we think of as regular supercomputers. RSC will be used to train a range of systems across Meta’s businesses: from content moderation algorithms used to detect hate speech on Facebook and Instagram to augmented reality features that will one day be available in the company’s future AR hardware. And, yes, Meta says RSC will be used to design experiences for the metaverse — the company’s insistent branding for an interconnected series of virtual spaces, from offices to online arenas. Read More
Daily Archives: January 25, 2022
What’s the metaverse? Whatever companies want it to be.
IN NOVEMBER, FACEBOOK announced that it was rebranding itself as Meta, sparking a lot of credulous media coverage of “the metaverse,” a somewhat nebulous concept comprising virtual reality, 3D gaming, and a number of other trends. Interest in the metaverse deepened earlier this week, after Microsoft announced plans to acquire Activision Blizzard, a leading game developer, for almost $70 billion. Microsoft stated near the top of a press release that the acquisition, which still needs the approval of the Federal Trade Commission, will “provide building blocks for the metaverse”—a claim repeated in more than one news story about the deal, though not universally taken at face value. Read More
Spectrum Labs raises $32M for AI-based content moderation that monitors billions of conversations daily for toxicity
Two years into the pandemic, online conversations are for many of us still the primary interactions that we are having every day, and we are collectively having billions of them. But as many of us have discovered, not all of those are squeaky clean, positive experiences. Today, a startup called Spectrum Labs — which provides artificial intelligence technology to platform providers to detect and shut down toxic exchanges in real time (specifically, 20 milliseconds or less) — is announcing $32 million in funding. It plans to use the money to continue investing in its technology to double down on its growing consumer business and to forge ahead in a new area, providing services to enterprises for their internal and customer-facing conversations, providing not just a way to help detect when toxicity is creeping into exchanges, but to provide an audit trail for the activity for wider trust and safety tracking and initiatives. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 