MENLO PARK, California: Facebook’s parent company Meta on Monday said it has created what it believes is among the fastest artificial intelligence supercomputers running today.
The social media giant said it hopes the machine will help lay the groundwork for its building of the metaverse, a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the Internet as we know it today.
Facebook said it believes the computer will be the fastest in the world once it is fully built around the middle of the year.
Supercomputers are extremely fast and powerful machines built to do complex calculations not possible with a regular home computer. Meta did not disclose where the computer is located or how much it is costing to build.
The computer, which is already up and running but is still being built, is called AI Research SuperCluster. Meta says it will help its AI researchers build “new and better” artificial intelligence models that can learn from “trillions” of examples and work across hundreds of different languages simultaneously and analyze text, images and video together.
The way Meta is defining the power of its computer is different from how conventional and more technically powerful supercomputers are measured because it relies on the performance of graphics-processing chips, which are useful for running “deep learning” algorithms that can understand what’s in an image, analyze text and translate between languages, said Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor and co-director of the AI center at Carnegie Mellon University.
“We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together,” Meta said in a blog post.
The company said its supercomputer will incorporate “real-world examples” from its own systems into training its AI. It says its previous efforts used only open-source and other publicly available data sets.
“They are going to, for the first time, put their customer data on their AI research computer,” Sandholm said. “That would be a really big change to give AI researchers and algorithms access to all that data.”
Facebook parent Meta creates powerful AI supercomputer
https://arab.news/n9bxf
Facebook parent Meta creates powerful AI supercomputer
- The computer, which is already up and running but is still being built, is called AI Research SuperCluster
Israeli court overturns conviction of officer who assaulted Palestinian journalist, citing ‘Oct. 7 PTSD’
- Judge sentenced Yitzhak Sofer to 300 hours of community service, saying officer “devoted his life to Israel’s security” and conviction was “disproportionate to severity of his actions”
- Footage shows Sofer throwing photojournalist Mustafa Alkharouf to the ground, and repeatedly beating and kicking him while he covered Palestinian gatherings near Al-Aqsa Mosque
LONDON: An Israeli court overturned the conviction of a border police officer who assaulted a Palestinian journalist, ruling his actions were influenced by post-traumatic stress disorder from serving during the Oct. 7 2023 attacks.
On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court sentenced officer Yitzhak Sofer to 300 hours of community service for assaulting Anadolu Agency photojournalist Mustafa Alkharouf in occupied East Jerusalem in December 2023.
Footage shows Sofer and other officers drawing weapons, throwing Alkharouf to the ground, and repeatedly beating and kicking him while he covered Palestinian gatherings near Al-Aqsa Mosque amid heavy restrictions.
Alkharouf was hospitalized with facial and body injuries. His cameraman, Faiz Abu Ramila, was also attacked.
Anadolu photojournalist Mustafa Alkharouf violently attacked by Israeli army in occupied East Jerusalem while covering Palestinian prayers near Al-Aqsa Mosque
— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) December 15, 2023
Incident highlights ongoing restrictions on Friday prayers and press freedom in region https://t.co/exT6XqjEaA pic.twitter.com/pqugK9HnOt
Sofer had been convicted in September 2024 of assault causing bodily harm (acquitted of threats) and initially faced six months’ community service, as recommended by Mahash, the Justice Ministry’s police misconduct unit.
Judge Amir Shaked accepted the defense request to cancel the conviction, replacing it with community service.
He cited Sofer’s PTSD from responding to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, noting the officer had “no prior criminal record” and had “devoted his life to Israel’s security.”
“The court cannot ignore this when considering whether the defendant’s conviction should stand,” he said, adding that while the incident is “serious and does cross the criminal threshold,” the conviction in place could cause Sofer harm “disproportionate to the severity of his actions.”
The ruling comes amid surging attacks on journalists in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since Israel’s war on Gaza began.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported Israel responsible for two-thirds of the 129 media workers killed worldwide in 2025, the deadliest year on record, citing a “persistent culture of impunity” and lack of transparent probes.
Reporters Without Borders called the Israeli army the “worst enemy of journalists” in its 2025 report, with nearly half of global reporter deaths in Gaza.
Foreign journalists face raids, arrests and intimidation. In late January 2026, Israel’s Supreme Court granted a delay on ruling a ban on foreign media access to Gaza.
