Shares of Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META) inches down in pre session on Tuesday as the summer of 2022 came to an end, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg assembled his top lieutenants for a five-hour examination of the business’s processing power, with a focus on its potential to undertake cutting-edge artificial intelligence work, according to a corporate letter acquired by Reuters.
Despite high-profile investments in AI research, the social media giant had been slow to adopt expensive AI-friendly hardware and software systems for its core business, hampering its ability to keep pace with innovation at scale even as it increasingly relied on AI to support its growth, according to the memo, company statements, and interviews with 12 people familiar with the changes, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal competition.
“When it comes to developing for AI, we have a significant gap in our tooling, workflows, and processes.” “We need to invest heavily here,” read the letter, authored by incoming head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan and placed on Meta’s internal message board in September but just now being published.
To support AI work, Meta would need to “fundamentally shift our physical infrastructure design, our software systems, and our approach to providing a stable platform,” according to the company.
For more than a year, Meta has been working on a big initiative to overhaul its AI infrastructure. While the business has openly admitted to “playing a little bit of catch-up” on AI hardware trends, specifics of the makeover, including capacity constraints, leadership changes, and a cancelled AI chip project, have not previously been revealed.
In response to questions regarding the memo and the restructure, Meta spokesman Jon Carvill stated that 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,” Carvill added. He refused to say if Meta had abandoned its AI chip.
Janardhan and other executives declined requests for interviews made through the corporation.
Meanwhile, after its Nov. 30 debut, Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT soared to become the fastest-growing consumer application in history, sparking a race among tech titans to release products using so-called generative AI, which, unlike other AI, creates human-like written and visual content in response to prompts.
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