Summary: Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is investing billions in Nvidia’s H100 graphics cards to build a massive compute infrastructure for AI research and projects. By end of 2024, Meta aims to have 350,000 of these GPUs, with total expenditures potentially reaching $9 billion. This move is part of Meta’s focus on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), competing with firms like OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind. The company’s AI and computing investments are a key part of its 2024 budget, emphasizing AI as their largest investment area.
Spending is definitely looks exponential at the moment:
Most breakthroughs have historically been made by university researchers, then put into use by corporations. Arguably, including most of the latest developments,. But university researchers were never going to get access to the $100 million in compute time to train something like GPT-4, lol.
The human brain has 100 trillion connections. GPT-4 has 1.76 trillion parameters (which are analogous to connections). It took 25k GPUs to train, so in theory, I guess it could be possible to train a human-like intelligence using 1.4 million GPUs. Transformers (the T in GPT) are not like human brains though. They “learn” once, then do not learn or add “memories” while they’re being used. They can’t really do things like planning either. There are algorithms for “lifelong learning” and planning, but I don’t think they scale to such large models, datasets, or real-world environments. I think there needs to be a lot theoretical breakthroughs to make AGI possible, and I’m not sure if more money will help that much. I suppose AGI could be achieved by trial and error (i.e. trying ideas and testing if they work without mathematically proving if or how well they’d work) instead of rigorous theoretical work.