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Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#81

Post by wizzwizz4 »

echelon wrote: post #66
__loam wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My paycheck depends on this technology destroying every field producing cultural artifacts"

Said the butter churner, cotton ginner, and petrol pumper. I work in film. I've shot dozens of them the old fashioned way. I've always hated how labor, time, and cost intensive they are to make. Despite instructions from the luminaries to "just pick up a camera", the entire process is stone age. The field is extremely inequitable, full of nepotism and "who you know". Almost every starry-eyed film student winds up doi…

> And if you think any Jack or Jill can just come in and text prompt a whole movie, you're crazy. It's still hard work and a metric ton of good taste.

If you want anything good, yes. If you just want something… I reckon it'd take a week to assemble an incomprehensible-nonsense-film pipeline, after which it's just a matter of feeding the computer electricity.

Short-term, this is going to funnel resources away from the people with good taste. Long-term, it might help collapse the entire "creative industry", after which we might get some of that artist liberation stuff you're talking about – but we might just end up with new gatekeeping strategies from the wealthy and connected, and business as usual.

Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#82

Post by Dr_Birdbrain »

NBJack wrote: post #58
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $3.5b Which is a fourth of what they spent in VR/AR in a year. And Gen AI is something they could easily get more revenue as it has now become proven technology, and Meta could possibly leapfrog others because of the data moat.

What moat exactly? Much of the user data they have access to is drying up due to new regulations, some of which prohibit IIRC direct use on models as well. I'm not even sure they can use historical data. Meta certainly has an edge in engineer count, undoubtedly. But I'd say they really, really want the metaverse to succeed more to have their on walled garden (i.e. equivalent power of Apple and Google stores, etc.). T…

I think the raw text inside Facebook groups is at least as valuable as Reddit data. Even if demographics data is restricted under European law, the raw text of people interacting is quite valuable.

Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#83

Post by bionhoward »

rthnbgrredf wrote: post #62
DEDLINE wrote: post #16

I wonder if Meta would ever try to compete with AWS / MSFT / GOOG for AI workloads

Meta could build their own cloud offering. But it would take years to match the current existing offerings of AWS, Azure and GCP in terms of scale and wide range of cloud solutions.

aww, those existing offerings are overcomplicated as hell, a fresh look could yield substantially simpler cloud developer experience and this would compete well against those other cloud offerings on simplicity alone

Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#84

Post by artninja1988 »

Legend2440 wrote: post #37
baby wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What loss lol. Stop the fud

Has literally anyone spent money on the metaverse? Maybe it'll still take off in the future, but it's a $40b loss so far.

>Has literally anyone spent money on the metaverse?

I guess people buy their vr headsets, if that counts. I'm not too familiar with what the "metaverse" entails though...

Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#85

Post by neuronexmachina »

neon_electro wrote: post #49
tayo42 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does video not be in the future mean? In social media tiktok and reels are everywhere?

They are referring to Facebook/Meta’s 2015 “pivot to video”, speculating there may be a similar thing happening more recently with AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video

TIL. Reading up on it a little, I'm surprised the class-action settlement was just $40M: https://www.videoadvertisingsettlement.com/

Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#86

Post by tintor »

islewis wrote: post #8

I know we won't get it this from FB, but I'd be really interested to see how the relationship of compute power to engineering hours scales. They mention custom building as much as they can. If FB magically has the option to 10x the compute power, would they need to re-engineer the whole stack? What about 100x? Is each of these re-writes just a re-write, or is it a whole order of magnitude more complex? My technical u…

"just a re-write"

Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#87

Post by echelon »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #81
echelon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said the butter churner, cotton ginner, and petrol pumper. I work in film. I've shot dozens of them the old fashioned way. I've always hated how labor, time, and cost intensive they are to make. Despite instructions from the luminaries to "just pick up a camera", the entire process is stone age. The field is extremely inequitable, full of nepotism and "who you know". Almost every starry-eyed film student winds up doi…

> And if you think any Jack or Jill can just come in and text prompt a whole movie, you're crazy. It's still hard work and a metric ton of good taste. If you want anything good , yes. If you just want something … I reckon it'd take a week to assemble an incomprehensible-nonsense-film pipeline, after which it's just a matter of feeding the computer electricity. Short-term, this is going to funnel resources away from t…

> If you want anything good, yes. If you just want something ...

You don't even need AI for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_poop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet

The idea that AI isn't going to be used as a creative tool too and that it won't lead to more and better art is a defeatist, Luddite attitude.

Similarly shaped people thought that digital cameras would ruin cinema and photography.

> Short-term, this is going to funnel resources away from the people with good taste.

On the contrary - every budding film student will soon [1] be able to execute on their entire visions straight out of the gates. No decades of clawing their way to a very limited, almost impossible to reach peak.

> it might help collapse the entire "creative industry"

The studio system. Not the industry.

> new gatekeeping strategies from the wealthy and connected, and business as usual.

Creatives have more ways of building brands and followings for themselves than ever before. It's one of the largest growing sectors of the economy, and lots of people are earning livings off of it.

You'll be able to follow that steampunk vampire creator that's been missing from the world until now. Every long tail interest will be catered to. Even the most obscure and wild tastes, ideas, and designs. Stuff that would never get studio funding.

As a creative, I'm overjoyed by this. My friends and I are getting to create things we never could make before [2].

[1] This and next year.

[2] Just an inspiration / aesthetic sample, but we're making a full film: https://imgur.com/a/JNVnJIn

Re: Building Meta's GenAI infrastructure

#88

Post by dougb5 »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #50
fuddle wrote: post #35

How much are they paying for H100's? If they are paying $10k: 350,000 NVIDIA H100 x $10k = $3.5b

> $3.5b Which is a fourth of what they spent in VR/AR in a year. And Gen AI is something they could easily get more revenue as it has now become proven technology, and Meta could possibly leapfrog others because of the data moat.

Proven technology, maybe, but proven product-market fit for the kinds of things Facebook is using it for? Their linked blog about AI features gives examples "AI stickers" and image editing... cool, but are these potential multi-billion dollar lifts to their existing business? I guess I'm skeptical it's worthwhile unless they're able to unseat ChatGPT with a market-leading general purpose assistant.
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