MARK ZUCKERBERG is planning to release the world’s fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer in a major step forward in his vision for a metaverse.

The founder of Facebook and its parent company, Meta Platforms Inc, announced on social media his new AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) computer would be ready by the middle of this year.

Built in collaboration with Nvidia Corp and Pure Storage Inc the new supercomputer will have the intelligence to analyse trillions of texts, images and videos at once.

It will have the ability to spot patterns in the data and learn from its findings to help identify harmful content.

The developers behind the RSC also hope the new supercomputer will help empower people across the world, by allowing users who speak different languages to communicate with each other via real-time translations.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post: “Meta has developed what we believe is the world’s fastest AI supercomputer.

“We’re calling it RSC for AI Research SuperCluster.

“The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute power (quintillions of operations / second!) and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.

“Congrats to the team on building RSC!”

In a blogpost for Meta, Kevin Lee, a technical program manager at the tech giant, and Shubho Sengupta, a software engineer, said RSC would lay the foundations to make the metaverse a reality.

“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,” they wrote.

“Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform – the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role.”

All data will be encrypted before being used by the RSC, helping to protect users’ privacy.

Zuckerberg first announced his plans for the metaverse on October 28, 2021.

At the time the company said it would take 10 years to build the metaverse as envisioned.

Meta has invested $10bn into virtual reality and augmented reality to help make it a reality.