Meta

A report from The Washington Post reveals Meta’s recent push to attract more teens to Instagram, which reportedly involved setting up a “living museum” inside its offices “to help employees internalize the lifestyles of their teenage targets:”

During Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said TikTok is “very much applying lessons they’ve learned in China to the rest of the world:”

Meta wants Threads to be the app you open first thing in the morning, and it sounds like some of you feel about the same way I do about that idea.

That’s the code-name of Meta’s new “new image and video-focused AI model,” The Wall Street Journal reports. The company is also developing an LLM code-named Avocado.

Meta had already announced the streaming service was coming to its headsets, but now it’s here.

On Threads, that is; Meta is testing “flair” labels for users in Communities that will show up on your posts to indicate what you like to talk about. Users who are “Community champions” can decide the flair options, Meta says.

The company formerly known as Facebook has had some trouble making its namesake metaverse become a thing. And rumors are that division of the company is facing massive budget cuts. But things aren’t going so smoothly elsewhere, either. Now word is that the company’s next-gen Phoenix mixed reality glasses are being delayed until 2027, according to Business Insider.

Reuters reports that Meta just bought Limitless, an AI pendant that listens to and summarizes your conversations. It’s a burgeoning category of wearables (see: Bee AI which was bought by Amazon) and hints that like Google, Meta’s interested in perhaps building its own ecosystem of AI-powered gadgets.

Initially, developers can only use the Wearable Device Access Toolkit to make apps for the Ray-Ban Meta and the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, but Meta’s Tyler Yee says the toolkit will be available for the Meta Ray-Ban Display and Oakley Meta Vanguard “soon.”

Threads will test a feature where you can include “dear algo” in a post to add more or less content on whatever you’re writing to the algorithm about to your feed, according to Threads boss Connor Hayes.

Meta is booting rival AI companies out of WhatsApp to reduce the competition for its own Meta AI assistant, a classic sign of confidence.

Members can now post under a nickname, along with a custom avatar, though admins have to approve them first. It’s a small step towards Discordification for Facebook, which has otherwise always insisted on posting under real names.

The company plants to start trading power, a move that could support the buildout of new power plants as grids try to keep up with rising electricity demand from data centers and generative AI, Bloomberg reports.

Lecun’s widely-rumored departure is official just weeks after significant layoffs affected Meta’s legacy Fundamental AI Research unit (FAIR) that he created. Lecun — the “odd man out” at Meta for believing LLMs are a “dead end” — called creating FAIR “my proudest non-technical accomplishment,” and says he will create a startup to continue his Advanced Machine Intelligence research, with Meta as a partner.