Zuckerberg Pledges Hundreds of Billions For AI Data Centers in Superintelligence Push (reuters.com) 45
Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive AI data centers for superintelligence, intensifying his pursuit of a technology that he has chased with a talent war for top AI engineers. From a report: The social media giant is among the large technology companies that have chased high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages in recent months to fast-track work on machines that can outthink humans on most tasks.
Unveiling the spending commitment in a Threads post on Monday, CEO Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company's core advertising business to support the massive spending that has raised concerns among tech investors about potential payoffs. "We have the capital from our business to do this," Zuckerberg said. He also cited a report from a chip industry publication Semianalysis that said Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring online a 1-gigawatt-plus supercluster, which refers to a massive data center built to train advanced AI models.
Unveiling the spending commitment in a Threads post on Monday, CEO Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company's core advertising business to support the massive spending that has raised concerns among tech investors about potential payoffs. "We have the capital from our business to do this," Zuckerberg said. He also cited a report from a chip industry publication Semianalysis that said Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring online a 1-gigawatt-plus supercluster, which refers to a massive data center built to train advanced AI models.
CreepyGPT (Score:1)
nuf sed
So... RIP Metaverse? (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy jumps from one buzzword tech du jour to the next with nothing to show for the previous massive investment. If I was a shareholder, I'd sell-sell-sell.
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This guy jumps from one buzzword tech du jour to the next with nothing to show for the previous massive investment. If I was a shareholder, I'd sell-sell-sell.
I can imagine in Zuckerberg's mind, creating the first true intelligent AI would lead to a re-build of the Metaverse by the AI, which would lead to him getting everything he's placed tech bets on over the last few years. Do *I* think it will pay off? Absolutely not. But when you have more money than god and a plethora of yes-people patting you on the head every time you so much as fart crosswise, you probably start to believe your own hype. I'd love to see him spend his company into oblivion, but unfortunat
Re: So... RIP Metaverse? (Score:2)
It may never come within your lifetime. As long as it has eyeballs, it will remain a bottomless money pit for advertisers.
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Grok is Musk's toy.
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RIP Metaverse?
No:
https://www.ft.com/content/c51... [ft.com]
You can bet your ass that Google and Meta are both looking into combining AI and AR/VR: https://blog.google/products/a... [blog.google]
If I was a shareholder, I'd sell-sell-sell.
You can short their stock. If you put your money where your mouth is and you're right, you'll be rich.
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Yup yup and it'd be a risky bet regardless. Look at the Meta 5Y stock price and the Metaverse announcement was Q3 2021. If you bought then you'd have had to know to sell about exactly one year later to have maximized that short.
If you already had stock or bought it then and held it you'd be looking at a tidy profit right now, it's up about $300/share since that Metaverse announcement.
The market is irrational and these companies are in fact "too big to fail", they just follow the general trends more than a
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Facebook's shitty, Nazi-trained AI bans people for posting links to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
Zuckerberg is a shit-eating robotic Nazi and the best thing for the world would be for every one of his companies to instantly go out of business.
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Well what should he do?
Sure you'd love it if Mark could have some great flash of insight and invent something or significantly enhance a concept like taking MySpace to early facebook, but playing catch up and 'us too' is surely better than sitting around doing nothing right?
Microsoft more or less ignored the Internet from 1992-1994 and that was an expensive lesson. The were comparatively quick to replicate what Amazon was doing with AWS and while only someone who has made a career of papering the cube walls
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Microsoft more or less ignored the Internet from 1992-1994....and in June 1992 there were only ten websites. The commercial internet wasn't a thing until July 1995.
You have a weird, fucked-up misconception of history.
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I don't believe in either product, but the super intelligence has a point. If you manage to get that, you'll make a ton of money. Metaverse could become a successful second life, but super intelligence would both give Meta advanced tech and a product everyone wants to subscribe to. So it is a high bet and will possibly fail, but if it does not fail they gain a lot.
Re:Even MS can't compete (Score:4, Interesting)
And of all the AI companies I know of, they're the one I'm least desirous for the success of. I literally would prefer China. Altman's no prize, but Zuckerberg...
Pledges? (Score:3)
Really kind of creeping me out on all this manufactured consent around AI.
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"Pledges" is just a synonym for "promises". You don't need to read anything extra into it. It's probably just a bit of a shorter headline.
Context and word choice matter (Score:2)
America needs to work on its critical thinking.
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In English that word is used in conjunction with donating the charity. This is just him investing for a return.
While you can use the word "pledge" to refer to a promised future donation to a charity (see, e.g., "pledge drive"), it's not an exclusive meaning. For native English speakers, I would not say that "pledge" particularly brings up the connotation of charity. Pledge just means to promise or vow something. "I pledge allegiance..." or "I pledge my support for this candidate." Etc.
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I can understand that patriotic Americans pledge allegiance to uphold the flag and constitution and all that.
It just isn't in common usage in Australian English.
If any political candidate here "pledged" anything as a mission statement, we'd be very cynical they were any different from the previous generations of dodgy corrupt bastards that represent us in parliament. Talk is cheap.
Yeah but this isn't their Australian website (Score:2)
In terms of who's going to see this article the most this is going to be viewed by Americans and an American English the word pledge has a very specific context.
So yeah this is absolutely manufactured consent.
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I can understand that patriotic Americans pledge allegiance to uphold the flag and constitution and all that.
Sure, that's a common usage of the word pledge, but again, it's hardly exclusive. Pledge just don't have the connotation of "charity" in general usage in the United States.
Pretty interesting the Australian English has a very different connotation! Pledge is a common word in the states.
Some American examples of pledge in the public discource:
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people” FDR
Abstinence pledges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Pledge is the process (and the person! "The pledge had to drink 5 beers...") that first-year college students who join a fraternity or sorority go through
and more wedding vows than I care to read or quote!
etc
Pledges used to be charity (Score:2)
I remember when Warren Buffet pledged to give away all his shares in Berkshire to charity.
Now they 'pledge' to invest in technology that scares the crap out of people.
To get over my fear of AI I will have to go watch a parody song about hillbilly Harry Potter on youtube. ;-D
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To get over my fear of AI I will have to go watch a parody song about hillbilly Harry Potter on youtube. ;-D
I've seen that. It's pretty fun. I would, unironically, watch that spinoff.
Midlife? (Score:2)
Yep, that will go well (Score:3)
Try normal intelligence first, i.e. actual insight. Apparently the way there is still very long or it may be impossible. Going for "superintelligence" is just deeply stupid at this time.
Re: Yep, that will go well (Score:2)
Ahah! But if you call bullshit on the output of a "Superintelligent LLM", the response will be that you are stupider than the chatbot and don't understand the answer! Checkmate! Your dominoes fall like a house of cards!
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Well, that at least gave me a good laugh! ^^
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Not really. Super-intelligent in a narrow area is a lot easier than ordinary intelligence over all fields. We've already got it in a few areas, like protein folding.
The kicker is AGI. I'm not sure that with a definition that matches the acronym that it's even possible, yet some companies claim to be attempting it. Usually, when you check, they've got a bunch of limitations in what they mean. A real AGI would be able to learn anything. This probably implies an infinite "stack depth". (It's not actual
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Gweihir is kind of infamous for refusing to admit that LLMs have any possible usage or that anyone is using them in a productive capacity today. His posts have been becoming increasingly strident of late.
The kicker is AGI. I'm not sure that with a definition that matches the acronym that it's even possible, yet some companies claim to be attempting it. Usually, when you check, they've got a bunch of limitations in what they mean. A real AGI would be able to learn anything. This probably implies an infinite "stack depth". (It's not actually a stack, but functionally it serves the same purpose.)
I don't like the term "AGI" because it's still nebulous and means different things to different people. The shifting window of vocabulary meanings in the AI field is rough. In the 1980s people regularly talked about chess as an AI problem. Now you can find plenty of people who say that's not AI. Ditto for G
Hundreds of billions? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just think of what could be accomplished if hundreds of billions was spent on improving conditions in this country. Infrastructure, education, healthcare, etc etc. School breakfast and lunch programs. Childcare that doesn't cost as much as a second mortgage allowing more people to work. Housing and care for veterans who come back damaged from their service.
But that's all commie socialism stuff so too bad losers.
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Just imagine what could be accomplished if he spent that on making the platform less toxic.
He's a glorified crack dealer promising to invest in cleaner crack houses so that customers can get their next fix in a nicer environment.
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Their goal seems to be to turn the US into a poorly educated, heavily armed nation of religious fanatics
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If US Federal spending is any indicator, not much, especially since the spending would be a one-time-only thing rather than a yearly thing.
Now it would be a good idea for Zuck to consider investing in power generation for datacentres instead of the datacentres themselves. And he'd likely make a tidy profit off such a venture.
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Hmm, make sustainable quality of life improvements/feed hungry children or make it easier to generate fake cat video spam?
I know which one Zuckerborg chooses.
Perhaps a little tweak? (Score:2)
In all seriousness; even if you are an 'AI' optimist(perhaps especially so, since you presumably think that this isn't just Zuck pissing away more money after his metaverse successes); would you want Facebook to have a commanding position in the area? It's not literally the worst possible company to potentially have to deal with; but it tries.
I have mixed opinions (Score:2)
AI research is good, and if something good comes out of the investment, it's a good thing.
The proper use of AI is to help us find answers to previously intractable problems in science, medicine, engineering etc.
A waste of the tech is to use it to create artificial "friends" who will sell us crap we don't need or convince us to vote for evil candidates.
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>> AI research is good,
I for one welcome our new Skynet overlords.
datacenters (Score:2)
I'm a little surprised that Zuck is choosing to invest so much in the hardware aspect of this but he seems to be fully committed to AI (for now). He does have a huge pile of cash, and if he doesn't build his own datacenters he'll be dependent on the firmly established players like Azure, AWS, and Google for the infrastructure..
Corporate Investment is Not a Pledge (Score:3)