Meta has unveiled a new AI accelerator in a bid to catch up with the competition

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Meta, seeking to strengthen its position in the field of generative artificial intelligence, has unveiled the next generation of its AI model accelerator, called MTIA. This is the next step in the techno-giant's multi-billion dollar investment in developing its own hardware.

Here's What We Know

The new MTIA is built using a 5nm process and has more compute cores, more memory and a higher clock speed than the previous version. Meta claims that the performance of the new generation MTIA is three times faster, although it points out that this figure is derived from testing only four key models.

The company claims that control over the entire technology stack allows them to achieve greater efficiency compared to using commercial GPUs. However, Meta admits that MTIA will not replace third-party accelerators, but will serve as a complement to them.

That said, the company is not yet using MTIA to train such models, although it has "several programmes" in that direction.

Analysts note that Meta's AI team is likely under a lot of pressure to cut costs. The company has $18bn to spend on GPUs by the end of 2024, so in-house chip development could be an attractive alternative.

Meanwhile, Meta's competitors like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are actively developing and deploying their own solutions to accelerate AI computing. This is forcing the social media giant to catch up, despite the relatively quick transition from first prototype to mass production of the next-generation MTIA.

Source: TechCrunch