At a virtual event this morning, Meta lifted the curtains on its efforts to develop in-house infrastructure for AI workloads, including generative AI like the type that underpins its recently launched ad design and creation tools.
It was an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly hardware systems — hobbling its ability to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Microsoft.
“Building our own [hardware] capabilities gives us control at every layer of the stack, from datacenter design to training frameworks,” Alexis Bjorlin, VP of Infrastructure at Meta, told TechCrunch. “This level of vertical integration is needed to push the boundaries of AI research at scale.”
Over the past decade or so, Meta has spent billions of dollars recruiting top data scientists and building new kinds of AI, including AI that now powers the discovery engines, moderation filters and ad recommenders found throughout
