Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 199 posts

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#141

Post by d1sxeyes »

forgotmyoldacc wrote: post #32
bearjaws wrote: post #5

“The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute power…and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg I don't really understand how AI processing is going to make the 'experiences' any better? This seems to me like investor fluff, saying they have some insane capability that other 'VR provider…

Example 1: GPT-3 is a decent chatbot. Training a similar model so you can have a conversation with AIs in the "metaverse" (god, that word is terrible) could be fun / useful. Example 2: Using AI upscaling (like Nvidia) to improve visual fidelity in games. Example 3: Hand/body tracking for avatars. The more AI compute, the more experimentation researchers can do.

One particularly interesting piece of tech I've seen is Nvidia's AI Video 'Compression'.

In summary, rather than actually streaming video to the person you're chatting with, you send a keyframe, and then 'compressed' video is sent over the wire, and 'decompressed' at the receiver end.

I'm putting 'compression' in quotations because to me I'm not sure I'm comfortable calling it compression. Basically, you're remotely controlling an avatar of yourself.

While the obvious usage of this is reducing bandwidth used (in their example, an h264 stream at ~100KB/frame can be compressed to 0.1KB/frame, literally a thousandth of the bandwidth), it opens up some VERY interesting possibilities for a company like Meta (check from about 1:55 onwards in the video below).

You can view someone's face from any angle, not just the angle they're speaking from (as you might in a VR world), or you can even map the key points onto a completely different keyframe, allowing for hyper-realistic avatars or next-level virtual backgrounds (imagine: you send a keyframe of you sitting at your desk and hop on a video conference from the beach, and no-one's any the wiser as long as the sea is quiet enough)

https://developer.nvidia.com/ai-video-compression

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#142

Post by terafo »

zydex wrote: post #140
terafo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not 12.7 million in 2021. It was 12.7 million in Q3 2021.

Where did you see that? This was my source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/gpu-shipments-increa... "Nvidia and AMD shipped 12.7 million cards in 2021" Please correct me if I'm misreading or clearly missing something.

If you look at the source article it is clearly stated.

>Year over year, total AIB shipments increased by 25.7% this quarter compared to last year at 12.7 million units, and up quarter-to-quarter from 11.47 million units in Q2’21.

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#143

Post by throwaway423342 »

reggieband wrote: post #118

I hate that I always end up referencing the Lex Friedman podcast but it is often relevant to discussion on HN. Recently Lex spoke with Yann LeCun and they had a brief chat about AI at Meta/Facebook [1] (where I believe Yann is currently Chief AI Scientist). He claims that AI is the core of Meta and that if you were to take ML out of Meta systems the company would literally crumble because it is completely built aroun…

As a side note:

I listened to the episode with Yann. Compared to other talks (e.g. the previous one with Brian Keating) it was a bit dull and uninteresting. The answers were not that insightful.

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#144

Post by 0x4d464d48 »

kleiba wrote: post #40

I used to work at a university where my professor had been in automatic speech recognition for a long time, but basically gave up on that line of research about 10 years ago because he figured that universities simply cannot compete budget wise with the big industry players. I suppose the same will soon be true for most ML-related areas of research sooner or later, at least as far as applied ML is concerned. Already,…

"But what if at some point they decide to be as "open" as OpenAI (ie., not)?"

Aisde from some of the academics and the "gain and share knowledge for knowledge's sake" types they hire why would they care?

For the record, I don't like the idea of scientific research becoming proprietary. At all. But is there anyone credulous enough to think these organizations would willingly risk their bottom line for principles like "openess" and not just play the PR games to make themselves appear open and concerned?

In other words "Don't LOOK evil but do evil when no one's looking".

The Frances Haugen already shows how damaging such openness can be.

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#145

Post by giantrobot »

nerdponx wrote: post #47
forgotmyoldacc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example 1: GPT-3 is a decent chatbot. Training a similar model so you can have a conversation with AIs in the "metaverse" (god, that word is terrible) could be fun / useful. Example 2: Using AI upscaling (like Nvidia) to improve visual fidelity in games. Example 3: Hand/body tracking for avatars. The more AI compute, the more experimentation researchers can do.

I guess "AI in the metaverse" sounds a lot better than "machine learning in Meta Inc's new VR platform".

VR advertising and tracking platform.

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#146

Post by cblconfederate »

ctoth wrote: post #11

Anybody else get the sense that we're just totally frickin doomed? Even if Yudkowsky is off about AGI (which is a big maybe!) in what possible world will this technology be used to make our individual lives better (assuming you're not a FAIR researcher?)

biology is hard, perhaps too complex for human brains to make a decent model of it. AI can solve it and try to explain it to us (if it pleases her)

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#147

Post by zydex »

terafo wrote: post #142
zydex wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you see that? This was my source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/gpu-shipments-increa... "Nvidia and AMD shipped 12.7 million cards in 2021" Please correct me if I'm misreading or clearly missing something.

If you look at the source article it is clearly stated. > Year over year, total AIB shipments increased by 25.7% this quarter compared to last year at 12.7 million units, and up quarter-to-quarter from 11.47 million units in Q2’21.

Understood, thank you for clarifying.

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#148

Post by giantrobot »

cm2012 wrote: post #35
bearjaws wrote: post #5

“The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute power…and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg I don't really understand how AI processing is going to make the 'experiences' any better? This seems to me like investor fluff, saying they have some insane capability that other 'VR provider…

Zuck has vision, especially for what people will want to use. I am looking forward to what FB comes up with here.

Do you get paid in MetaBucks or a real currency? What are the hours and benefits like? Does Zuck wave out a window at you in lieu of cash bonuses?

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#149

Post by giantrobot »

ModernMech wrote: post #88
yumraj wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The doom comes from the matrix being built by people who either don't have our best interests in mind ... You mean like Zuckerberg and FB?

What makes you believe that Mark "I can't believe those dumb fucks trust me" Zuckerberg doesn't have our best interests in mind?

Just a hunch...

Re: Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer

#150

Post by eezurr »

bee_rider wrote: post #29
adamnemecek wrote: post #2

Wow, I hope that the surveillance state will be at last 30% more efficient.

The cool thing about improving efficiency is that you can either keep doing what you were doing, but 30% cheaper, or you can just do 30% more of it! The best thing is, assuming the 'quality' of their product scales with the amount of work put into it, we'll get... 30% more accurate ads? Somehow they'll steal 30% of Google's lunch? Well, I don't know, but it sure looks like an incredible amount of engineering talent h…

I think you're not considering the effective efficiency difference. This is what scares me about unreviewed (by society, government) advances in technology.

If we increase the efficiency of something (lets say software) by 100%, all the good things that can be done with software gain a 100% efficiency. However, that does not equate to all the bad things that can be done with software gain a 100% efficiency. Many destructive actions are orders of magnitude more efficient than all things constructive (currently), so the net result is that the world gets more dangerous.

For a more physical example, consider that a truck filled with powerful explosives could knock down a sky scraper. That is, for a handful of manhours, it is possible to undo the work of hundreds of thousands of manhours, plus the hundreds of thousands of manhours society would need to divert to managing the after effects of that disaster, and the emotional cost, etc.

There's an underlying efficiency bonus that destructive actions have that is not being accounted for.

Post reply on HN