Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, counts more than 3 billion monthly users across its family of apps. Now, it’s trying to build the next generation of services in virtual reality and the metaverse through Meta Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds — all while dealing with antitrust pressures, privacy concerns, and younger users shifting to other platforms.
Adobe’s updated Premiere video editing app, which launched on iOS last September, will finally arrive on Android “this summer.” It’ll include some Android-exclusive templates and effects designed for YouTube Shorts.
There are also Android-exclusive tools coming to Instagram’s Edits app, including AI upscaling and automatic audio track separation.
[Google Blog]
Meta says the event will offer “the first glimpse of what’s coming to the next computing platform,” with an “evening keynote” and “developer sessions where we’ll share the latest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI.”
At last year’s event, Meta debuted its smart glasses with a display.
The logo isn’t too different from the previous version, but I think it looks nice. Threads’ head of design has a… thread… with a little more about the changes.
When Instagram’s iPad app launched last year, it would open up to a feed of Reels instead of the usual mix of posts you might be familiar with from the iOS app. Now, though, the iPad app has a more familiar home feed that works like the one in the iOS app, as reported by 9to5Mac.
Meta recently began tracking employees’ computer activity to train its AI models, plans to cut 10 percent of staff later this month, and is pushing “employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents,” sparking “anger and anxiety,” reports the New York Times:
Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said.
Meta argues that the UK communications regulator has “disproportionate” fine calculations — up to ten percent of the company’s global revenue for Online Safety Act breaches — that should instead be “based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in.” The EU uses a similar methodolgy for fines.
Months after reporting on men who approach women in public while wearing Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses or other similar devices, then post their covert recordings to get paid, the BBC has this update highlighted by Gizmodo. “Alice” was in a video viewed over 40,000 times on social media, and when she contacted the operator, they said they would remove it as a “paid service,” bringing back an old strategy with a new, and worse, wearable twist.
According to Reuters, Meta filed to ask a judge to toss out the jury’s March verdict, which found that Meta (and YouTube) were negligent.
Meta had said at the time of the ruling that it planned to appeal. Google also said it plans to appeal.
The agent is dubbed “Hatch” internally, The Information reports. Meta is also apparently working on an agentic shopping tool for Instagram that it wants to launch before Q4.
Did those influencers in your Instagram feed go to Coachella, and do they even exist in real life? Creators can voluntarily add a new label to their account if they frequently post AI-generated or modified content starting on Monday.
This is in addition to Meta’s automatically applied “AI info” label for content on its platforms that it detects as being AI-modified.
The deal for the company, Assured Robot Intelligence, closed on Friday, according to Bloomberg. The publication reported last year that Meta was starting to work on humanoid robots.
Outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook and current Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are considering bids for the Seattle Seahawks, Front Office Sports reports.
Paul Allen’s estate began the sale process for the NFL team in February after this year’s Super Bowl win. (Go Hawks, that was a great game.)
[Front Office Sports]
All the ad people I know keep saying “the content is the targeting” lately, and now I know why: Google and Meta are using AI to flip the online ad model upside down. Big dive in the NYT:
But the real business breakthroughs have come from targeting. It used to be that an advertiser would say, for example, “I want to target women in New York between the ages of 24 and 35.” Now it’s the opposite: Meta and Google are using A.I. to recommend customers the brands should be going after.
[The New York Times]
Meta announced a new deal this morning with Overview Energy, a space-based solar company with plans to demo beaming “energy wirelessly from space to a solar farm on Earth” in 2028, ahead of commercial delivery in 2030.
Its satellites sit in geosynchronous orbit roughly 22,000 miles above Earth’s equator, where sunlight is constant, collecting energy in space and beaming it to Earth-based solar facilities on the ground as low-intensity, near-infrared light. This means solar farms that currently sit idle at night can keep producing electricity around the clock, maximizing their output and creating more energy for the grid.
The economic watchdog did not explain its decision to cancel the deal, which Beijing had scrutinized since it was first announced in December. It was largely complete and Manus is already integrated into some of Meta’s tools.
DirecTV now supports mixed reality with its new app for the Quest 2, 3, 3S, and even Pro headsets. There’s live TV for subscribers, plus on-demand and ad-supported content anyone can watch, available in the app store or through the Horizon TV hub Meta launched last year.
This hub holds certain settings that work across Meta’s apps and allows for using a single password for access across all accounts and managing passkeys.
Any accounts users currently have connected in Meta’s Account Center will automatically transfer to the new Meta Account that’s rolling out “over the next year.”
The new supervision feature shows the topics that teens have asked Meta AI about over the last week and is available now in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Brazil. It also works on Facebook… as if teens use Facebook. It builds upon previous work to alert parents if their kids repeatedly search for self-harm topics.
When you’re in a Threads Community’s live chat, you can talk with real time with other users about what’s going on. For the NBA playoffs, the NBA Threads Community will be hosting some live chats to follow games. Live chats will come to other Community feeds in the coming months, Meta says.
Inventing the future requires a future people want.
The job cuts could affect around 10 percent of Meta’s workforce, or around 8,000 employees, according to Reuters. This is reportedly the first of two waves of layoffs planned for this year, and follows an earlier report from Reuters that suggests Meta could cut as much as 20 percent of its workforce.
