Meta pulls the curtain back on its A.I. chips for the first time
Meta has built custom computer chips to help with its artificial intelligence and video-processing tasks, and is talking about them in public for the first time.
The social networking giant disclosed its internal silicon chip projects for the first time to reporters earlier this week, ahead of a Thursday virtual event discussing its AI technical infrastructure investments.
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Investors have been closely watching Meta’s investments into AI and related data center hardware as the company embarks on a “year of efficiency” that includes at least 21,000 layoffs and major cost cutting.
Although it’s expensive for a company to design and build its own computer chips, vice president of infrastructure Alexis Bjorlin told CNBC that Meta believes that the improved performance will justify the investment. The company has also been overhauling its data center designs to focus more on energy-efficient techniques, like liquid cooling, to reduce excess heat.
One of the new computer chips, the Meta Scalable Video Processor (MSVP), is used to process and transmit video to users while cutting down on energy requirements. Bjorlin said “there was nothing commercially available” that could handle the task of processing and delivering 4 billion videos a day as efficiently as Meta wanted.
The other processor is the first in the company’s Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) family of chips intended to help with various AI-specific tasks. The new MTIA chip specifically handles “inference,” which is when an already-trained AI model makes a prediction or takes an action.
Bjorlin said that the new AI inference chip helps power some of Meta’s recommendation algorithms used to show content and ads in people’s news feeds. She declined to answer who is manufacturing the chip, but a blog post said that the processor is “fabricated in TSMC 7nm process,” indicating that chip-giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is producing the technology.
She said that Meta has a “multi-generational roadmap” for its family of AI chips that include processors used for the task of training AI models, but declined to offer details beyond the new inference chip. Reuters previously reported that Meta cancelled one AI inference chip project and started another that was supposed to roll out around 2025, but Bjorlin declined to comment on that report.
Because Meta isn’t in the business of selling cloud computing services like companies including Google-parent Alphabet or Microsoft, the company didn’t feel compelled to publicly talk about its internal data center chip projects, she said.
“If you look at we’re sharing—our first two chips that we developed—it’s definitely giving a little bit of a view into what are we doing internally,” Bjorlin said. “We haven’t had to advertise this, and we don’t need to advertise this, but you know, the world is interested.”
Meta vice president of engineering Aparna Ramani said the company’s new hardware was developed to work effectively with its home-grown PyTorch software, which has become one of the most popular tools used by third-party developers to create AI apps.
The new hardware will eventually be used to power tasks related to the metaverse, such as virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as the burgeoning field of generative AI, which generally refers to AI software that can create, compelling text, images, and videos.
Ramani also said that Meta has developed a generative AI-powered coding assistant for the company’s developers to help them more easily create and operate software. The new assistant is similar to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot tool that it released in 2021 with help from the AI startup OpenAI.
In addition, Meta said it completed the second-phase buildout, or the final buildout, of its supercomputer dubbed Research SuperCluster (RSC), which the company detailed last year. Meta used the supercomputer, which contains 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, to train the company’s LLaMA language model, among other uses.
Ramani said that Meta continues to act on its belief that it should contribute to open-source technologies and AI research in order to push the field of technology. The company has disclosed that its biggest LLaMA language model, LLaMA 65B, contains 65 billion parameters and was trained on 1.4 trillion tokens, which refers to the data used for AI training.
Companies like OpenAI and Google have not publicly disclosed similar metrics for their competing large language models, although CNBC reported this week that Google’s PaLM 2 model was trained on 3.6 trillion tokens and contains 340 billion parameters.
Unlike other tech companies, Meta released its LLaMA language model to researchers so they can learn from the technology. However, the LlaMA language model was then leaked to the wider public, leading to many developers building apps incorporating the technology.
Ramani said that Meta is “still thinking through all of our open source collaborations, and certainly, I want to reiterate that our philosophy is still open science and cross collaboration.”
Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Apple is losing market share in China due to declining iPhone shipments, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a report on Friday. The stock slid 2.4%.
“Apple has adopted a cautious stance when discussing 2025 iPhone production plans with key suppliers,” Kuo, an analyst at TF Securities, wrote in the post. He added that despite the expected launch of the new iPhone SE 4, shipments are expected to decline 6% year over year for the first half of 2025.
Kuo expects Apple’s market share to continue to slide, as two of the coming iPhones are so thin that they likely will only support eSIM, which the Chinese market currently does not promote.
“These two models could face shipping momentum challenges unless their design is modified,” he wrote.
Kuo wrote that in December, overall smartphone shipments in China were flat from a year earlier, but iPhone shipments dropped 10% to 12%.
There is also “no evidence” that Apple Intelligence, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence offering, is driving hardware upgrades or services revenue, according to Kuo. He wrote that the feature “has not boosted iPhone replacement demand,” according to a supply chain survey he conducted, and added that in his view, the feature’s appeal “has significantly declined compared to cloud-based AI services, which have advanced rapidly in subsequent months.”
Apple’s estimated iPhone shipments total about 220 million units for 2024 and between about 220 million and 225 million for this year, Kuo wrote. That is “below the market consensus of 240 million or more,” he wrote.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
New Tesla Model 3 vehicles on a truck at a logistics drop zone in Seattle, Washington, on Aug. 22, 2024.
M. Scott Brauer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla is voluntarily recalling about 239,000 of its electric vehicles in the U.S. to fix an issue that can cause its rearview cameras to fail, the company disclosed in filings posted Friday to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website.
“A rearview camera that does not display an image reduces the driver’s rear view, increasing the risk of a crash,” Tesla wrote in a letter to the regulator. The recall applies to Tesla’s 2024-2025 Model 3 and Model S sedans, and to its 2023-2025 Model X and Model Y SUVs.
The company also said in the acknowledgement letter that it has already “released an over-the-air (OTA) software update, free of charge” that can fix some of the vehicles’ camera issues.
In 2024, Tesla issued 16 recalls in the U.S. that applied to 5.14 million of its EVs, according to NHTSA data. The recall remedies included a mix of over-the-air software updates and parts replacements. More than 40% of last year’s recalls pertained to issues with the newest vehicle in the company’s lineup, the Cybertruck, an angular steel pickup that Tesla began delivering to customers in late 2023.
Regarding the latest recall, the company said it had received 887 warranty claims and dozens of field reports but told the NHTSA that it was not aware of any injurious, fatal or other collisions resulting from the rearview camera failures.
Other customers with vehicles that “experienced a circuit board failure or stress that may lead to a circuit board failure,” which cause the backup camera failures, can have their vehicles’ computers replaced by Tesla, free of charge, the company said.
Tesla did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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