| |JUNE 202319A large-scale rollout of the bespoke processor, which was scheduled for 2022, was canceled by Meta in favor of orders for Nvidia GPUs worth billions of dollars, which necessitated a significant overhaul of several of its data centers.In an effort to turn things around, Meta started preparations to begin creating a more ambitious internal chip, scheduled to be released in 2025 and capable of both operating and training AI models.In a series of blog posts, the owner of Facebook and Instagram said that as part of the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) program, it will design a first-generation microprocessor in 2020. The goal was to make the recommendation models, which are used to distribute adverts and other material in news feeds, more effective.According to the posts, the initial MTIA chip was only focused on the AI technique known as inference, in which computers trained on vast quantities of data make decisions about whether to display, for example, a dancing video or a cat meme as the next item in a user's feed.Custom AI chips are becoming more and more popular among major players in the technology industry. To train massive generative AI systems like PaLM-2 and Imagen, Google developed a processor known as the TPU (short for tensor processing unit).The MTIA is an ASIC, a type of chip that combines various circuits on a single circuit board and can be designed to perform one or more functions simultaneously.
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