Uncategorized
Inside Meta’s scramble to catch up on AI
According to a business memo dated Sept. 20, 2022, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembled his top lieutenants for a five-hour examination of the company’s computing power, focusing on its potential to execute cutting-edge artificial intelligence work.
According to the memo, company statements, and interviews with 12 people familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal comp, the social media giant had been slow to adopt expensive AI-friendly hardware and software systems for its main business, hindering its ability to keep pace with innovation at scale even as it increasingly relied on AI to support its growth.
“AI development tooling, techniques, and processes are lacking. “We need to invest heavily here,” read Santosh Janardhan’s memo, put on Meta’s internal message board in September and disclosed now.
“Fundamentally shifting our physical infrastructure design, our software systems, and our approach to providing a stable platform” is needed to support AI work, Meta (META.O) said.
Meta has spent over a year revamping its AI infrastructure. The business has openly admitted “playing a little bit of catch-up” on AI hardware trends, but capacity crunches, leadership changes, and a cancelled AI chip project have not been published.
Meta spokesperson Jon Carvill responded to the message and restructure by saying the business “has a proven track record in creating and deploying state-of-the-art infrastructure at scale combined with deep expertise in AI research and engineering.”
“We’re confident in our ability to continue expanding our infrastructure’s capabilities to meet our near-term and long-term needs as we bring new AI-powered experiences to our family of apps and consumer products,” added Carvill. He refused to say if Meta abandoned its AI chip. Meta has been cutting off personnel at a rate not seen since the dotcom crisis since November due to those investments.
After its Nov. 30 debut, Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, sparking a race among tech giants to release products using generative AI, which creates human-like written and visual content in response to prompts.
Five sources stated generative AI devours processing power, intensifying Meta’s capacity struggle.
Falling behind
Those five individuals indicated Meta’s late adoption of GPUs for AI work was a major problem.
GPU chips can analyze billions of data points in parallel, making them ideal for artificial intelligence processing.
GPUs are more expensive than other chips, and Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) controls 80% of the market and dominates software, sources said.
Nvidia declined comment for this story.
Meta used its fleet of commodity central processing units (CPUs), the computing world’s workhorse chip, to run AI tasks until last year.
Two people said the corporation started utilizing its own proprietary chip for inference, an AI technique in which algorithms trained on massive quantities of data make judgements and respond to instructions.
By 2021, the two-pronged solution was slower and less efficient than one based on GPUs, which were more adaptable in running multiple models than Meta’s processor, the two people said.
Meta didn’t comment on its AI chip.
Four sources said that as Zuckerberg pivoted the company toward the metaverse—a set of digital worlds enabled by augmented and virtual reality—its capacity crunch was slowing its ability to deploy AI to respond to threats like TikTok and Apple-led ad privacy changes.
In early 2022, former Meta board member Peter Thiel resigned without explanation due to the blunders.
According to two sources, Thiel told Zuckerberg and his executives at a board meeting before he left that they were complacent about Meta’s core social media business and focused too much on the metaverse, leaving the company vulnerable to TikTok.
Meta said nothing.
CATCH-UP
After canceling a 2022 rollout of Meta’s own inference technology, management ordered billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs, one insider claimed.
Meta rejected comment.
Meta was already several steps behind competitors like Google, which had began deploying its TPU GPUs in 2015.
In March, executives reorganized Meta’s AI groups, hiring two new heads of engineering, including Janardhan, the September memo’s author.
According to LinkedIn profiles and a source familiar with the departures, more than a dozen executives left Meta during the months-long upheaval, a near-total turnover of AI infrastructure leadership.
Meta then redesigned its data centers to handle GPUs, which consume more power and heat than CPUs and must be grouped with specialized networking.
Janardhan and other executives declined company-requested interviews.
According to company reports, the redesign increased Meta’s capital spending by $4 billion a quarter, nearly doubling its spend as of 2021, and halted or canceled four data center builds. Janardhan’s memo and four unnamed sources said the facilities needed 24 to 32 times the networking capacity and new liquid cooling systems to manage the clusters’ heat.
Meta began designing a more ambitious in-house processor that could train AI models and perform inference like a GPU. Two sources indicated the unreported project will end around 2025.
Meta spokeswoman Carvill said data center building would continue later this year after migrating to the new designs. He didn’t discuss the chip project.
TRADE-OFFS
Meta has little to offer as Microsoft and Google debut commercial generative AI technologies while expanding up GPU capacity.
“Basically all of our AI capacity is going towards ads, feeds and Reels,” Meta’s TikTok-like short video format, CFO Susan Li said in February.
Four individuals said Meta prioritized generative AI products after ChatGPT launched in November. They said Facebook was not focused on turning its well-regarded research into products, even though its research center FAIR, or Facebook AI Research, has been publishing prototypes since late 2021.
Investor interest is rising. Zuckerberg announced a top-level generative AI team in February to “turbocharge” the company’s development.
This month, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said that Meta would debut a product this year, focusing on generative AI with Zuckerberg.
Two people familiar with the new team said its early work focused on establishing a foundation model, a core software that can be fine-tuned and customized for different products.
Meta spokeswoman Carvill said multiple teams have been producing generative AI solutions for over a year. In ChatGPT’s months, development has intensified, he said.
Uncategorized
Israeli attacks in Gaza add to the heavy Palestinian toll in the war on Hamas.
Israeli attacks in Gaza add to the heavy Palestinian toll in the war on Hamas. Israeli forces bombarded the central region of Gaza by land, sea, and air. Palestinian officials claimed scores more casualties, and the United Nations health agency stated that thousands of Palestinians were attempting to leave the fighting.
Israel has not wavered in its determination to eradicate the Palestinian militant group Hamas as a reaction to the terrorist organization’s attack on Israel on October 7. This is the case, although international requests have been made for a ceasefire and an improvement in the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.
Late on Wednesday, medical personnel reported that Israeli aircraft had carried out three attacks in the Al Nuseirat neighborhood of central Gaza, resulting in the deaths of seven people and injuries to numerous more.
The World Health Organization of the United Nations said that its personnel had witnessed tens of thousands of civilians escape severe strikes in Khan Younis and the Middle Area by walking, riding donkeys, or driving into vehicles. A statement made on Wednesday stated that improvised shelters were being constructed along the road.
On the diplomatic front, where international pressure on Israel has increased, French President Emmanuel Macron sent a call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he emphasized the necessity of working for a truce that is both long-lasting and sustainable with the assistance of regional and international allies, according to the French Presidency.
An Israeli bombardment on Wednesday near Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, which is located in the southern Gaza Strip, resulted in the deaths of twenty Palestinians, according to a statement released by the Gaza Ministry of Health. Immediately after the incident, the Israeli military did not provide any remarks.
Medical personnel said that one airstrike resulted in the deaths of five Palestinians in the Al-Maghazi region of central Gaza. Meanwhile, health authorities reported that seven Palestinians’ bodies arrived at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which is located to the north as well.
As night fell, residents in the central Gaza Strip said that Israeli tank bombardment intensified east of Al-Bureij and Al-Maghazi, which is the area where tanks have been attempting to force their way through.
An increase in Israeli Army casualties
The Israeli military said on Wednesday that three more troops had been killed in action in Gaza, raising the total number of military casualties to 166 since the beginning of ground operations on October 20.
On October 7, the worst day in Israel’s history, Hamas carried out a cross-border rampage that resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of 240 hostages. This led to the outbreak of war. The response of the Netanyahu administration has destroyed a significant portion of Gaza, which Hamas administers.
According to the Gaza health ministry, the number of Israeli assaults that resulted in deaths and injuries in the enclave was 21,110 lives lost and 55,243 people injured.
It is estimated that nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced to leave their homes.
BLOODLINES OF VIOLENCE
Several countries in the Middle East and the West have expressed concern over the war’s expansion, which now includes the northern border between Israel and Lebanon. According to sources inside the security sector, Hezbollah launched a more significant number of rockets and drones armed with weapons on Wednesday than it has on any other day.
The cabinet minister, Benny Gantz, stated that the situation must be changed. The Israeli military has stated that its airplanes have hit military positions belonging to Hezbollah as well as other locations in Lebanon.
During a news conference, he stated, “The Israel Defense Forces will do it if the world and the Lebanese government do not act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents and to distance Hezbollah from the border.” He was alluding to the Israeli military.
In Washington, Vice President Joe Biden stated that the purpose of the United States military strikes that took place in Iraq on Monday was to discourage Iran and militia groups that Iran supports from launching attacks against American personnel and bases. Three Americans suffered injuries as a result of an earlier Monday drone attack by militants with ties to Iran.
Since the beginning of the war, there has been an increase in the number of confrontations that have taken place between Israeli forces and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. According to the Palestinian health ministry, a drone strike that occurred on Wednesday during an Israeli raid in Tulkarm killed six Palestinians.
Israeli military forces came under attack from militants in that area during a counterterrorism operation, who threw explosive devices at them. The Israeli military has denied any involvement in the attack. An Israeli Air Force aircraft was said to have struck the individuals who carried out the attack.
The conflict occurred in the Nour Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm, a city considered a flashpoint due to its location on one of the primary crossing points into the West Bank.
Witnesses say the six men slain were seated together in the early hours of the morning but were not involved in fights with Israeli soldiers.
“We heard the sound and the screaming; our house is nearby so we came out to see,” said Izzaldin Assaili, a local who lives nearby.
Uncategorized
Russians are banned from traveling and must hand over passports within five days.
By a regulation issued by the government that will go into effect on Monday, Russian citizens who have been prohibited from traveling outside the country will be required to hand over their passports to the authorities within five days of receiving notification of the restriction.
A travel ban can be imposed by the authorities in Russia on a variety of individuals, including conscripts, employees of the Federal Security Service (FSB), convicted individuals, and anyone who have access to state secrets or “information of special importance,” amongst other categories of individuals.
The passport that has been returned will be kept in storage by the authority that issued it, such as the authorities employed by the Ministry of the Interior or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Therefore, by the order issued by the government, the passport may be restored following the completion of an application after the travel ban has been lifted.
According to the resolution, those whose freedom to travel was temporarily restricted because they were required to serve in the military or an alternative civilian capacity would be required to present further a military identification card that includes evidence that they have finished their duty.
The Financial Times reported in March, citing unidentified people close to the situation, that Russia’s security services were taking the passports of top officials and executives of state companies to prohibit them from traveling outside the country.
POLITICS
China’s Li promotes greater cooperation with Indonesia.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has advocated for greater cooperation between China and Indonesia, emphasizing the importance of strong bilateral ties. This article delves into the significance of Li’s visit and the potential areas of cooperation between these two Asian nations.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has embarked on a mission to enhance cooperation and strengthen diplomatic ties between China and Indonesia. China and Indonesia hold significant regional influence, and their cooperation can have far-reaching implications in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Economic collaboration is a key focus of discussions, with trade and investment central to the bilateral relationship. Infrastructure development projects like the Belt and Road Initiative may offer joint ventures and partnership opportunities. Cooperation on maritime issues, including security and trade, is of mutual interest, given Indonesia’s strategic location.
Enhancing people-to-people exchanges, such as cultural programs and educational partnerships, can strengthen the bonds between the two nations.
China’s relations with Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia have geopolitical significance, with both nations navigating complex regional dynamics. Collaboration between China and Indonesia can contribute to regional stability and economic growth in Southeast Asia.
Both nations face shared challenges, including environmental concerns and the need for sustainable development.
In conclusion, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Indonesia underscores the commitment of both nations to strengthening their bilateral ties. The potential for enhanced economic cooperation, infrastructure development, and collaboration on regional and global issues paves the way for a deeper and more impactful relationship. As these two influential Asian nations explore areas of mutual interest and address shared challenges, their partnership can shape Southeast Asia and contribute to regional stability and prosperity.
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