Facebook trumpets massive new supercomputer

PARIS: Facebook’s parent company Meta announced on Monday it was launching one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to boost its capacity to process data, despite persistent disputes over privacy and disinformation.

The US tech giant said the array of machines could process images and video up to 20 times faster than their current systems. The supercomputer, built from thousands of processors, will be used to "seamlessly analyse text, images, and video together; develop new augmented reality tools; and much more", the firm said in blog post written by two of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers.

They envisage developing AI tools that will, among other things, allow people speaking in several different languages to understand each other in real-time. Meta said the machine, known as AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), was already in the top five fastest supercomputers and would become the fastest AI machine in the world when fully built in the next few months.

Platforms like Facebook and Google have long been criticised for the way they process and utilise the data they take from their users. The two firms currently face legal cases across the European Union that allege data transfers from the bloc to the United States are illegal.

And the AI algorithms that funnel Facebook users towards appealing posts have been criticised for helping to fuel disinformation and hate speech. Facebook has apologised repeatedly about the adverse effects of its algorithms and has long flagged its investment in content moderators and other measures to tackle problematic posts.