Meta does reorganization its AI teams joining the growing ranks of companies trying to create artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Mark Zuckerberg, who has increasingly focused on the company’s AI research, said the change would help the company “accelerate” its research and ultimately improve the metaverse.
Currently, Meta has two AI research teams: the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, launched in 2013, and a team focused exclusively on generative AI experiences for users of their apps. With the change, Zuckerberg said, it will bring the two “closer together” as the company looks to expand both groups. Meta’s CEO didn’t say how many employees he might add to its AI efforts, but the expansion is notable given that the company is targeting more than 20,000 jobs by 2022.
In a video Sharing on Threads, Zuckerberg said the changes “will support our long-term goals of building shared intelligence, responsibly open-sourcing it, and making it accessible and useful to everyone in our everyday lives.” The change is also the latest way Zuckerberg is trying to position Meta as the leading AI company in an increasingly crowded field of generative AI companies and projects.
Creating AGI, a type of AI that is often compared intelligence has become a particular fascination for many of these companies, including Elon Musk’s x.ai, OpenAI, and Google. Now, Zuckerberg is pouring Meta’s vast resources into the effort. Zuckerberg wrote: “We are building massive amounts of infrastructure. “By the end of this year, we’ll have ~350k Nvidia H100s, and if you include other GPUs, we’ll have a total of ~600k H100s H100 compute equivalent.”
At the same time, Zuckerberg has made it clear that he has no plans to abandon the metaverse, which he says will also benefit from AI developments. “The two core parts of our vision—AI and the metaverse—are interconnected,” he said.
Linking the company’s AI work to the metaverse is not a new strategy for Zuckerberg, who spent much of last year’s Connect event. generative AI. Still, it can be risky. Zuckerberg’s metaverse is still not widely understood or particularly popular. But Zuckerberg thinks that could change as the company improves its smart glasses and artificial intelligence they are. “By the end of the decade, I think a lot of people will be talking to AI frequently throughout the day using smart glasses like we’ve built with the Ray Ban Meta,” he said.
