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.
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You may look ridiculous, but the feature set is perfect for gadget nerds who love the outdoors.
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This very first-gen device raises several questions about where the next chapter of mobile computing is headed.
Bloomberg reports that Ke Yang, only just promoted to head of the team, is leaving for Meta. He was tasked with building a Siri search tool to rival ChatGPT and Gemini, and is one of a dozen or so prominent AI departures for Apple this year.
Tulloch helped launch Thinking Machines with Mira Murati, who famously left OpenAI to start her own company. Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to buy Thinking Machines and other AI companies have been a pretty open secret. While the big swings to buy companies like Perplexity have fallen short, he has managed to steal away some high profile talent from rivals.
[The Wall Street Journal]
In an internal message seen by 404 Media, Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of metaverse, tells workers to use AI to build products five times faster:
Imagine a world where anyone can rapidly prototype an idea, and feedback loops are measured in hours — not weeks. That’s the future we’re building.
Shah told Lowpass this week about Meta’s push to expand the metaverse to more places, like your Instagram feed.
Remember when Mark Zuckerberg got really obsessed with the Metaverse and decided we were all going to live in VR, right up until AI became the future instead? Well, good news, Meta hasn’t given up on the Metaverse yet!
gen_Eric:
I honestly thought the “metaverse” was long dead. I had no idea it still existed and was still being worked on. Figured once the VR hype died and the AI hype started, they were basically done with the “metaverse.”
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Meta’s AI translation feature initially worked with English and Spanish.
Plain old pictures are out; content is in.
If you want to buy the Meta Ray-Ban Display, you must book an appointment for an in-person demo, Meta says. Even then, Meta says that the preferred color and size you want may not be in stock. If that’s the case, you’ll be added to a waitlist.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri discovered this week that his “I’m not listening to you through your phone” T-shirt was raising a lot of questions already answered by his shirt. But real heads know that Instagram doesn’t need to listen to you, because it already knows everything anyway.
Nixel:
Yeah, we don’t listen to you… just endlessly track you across the internet building up so much data that it seems exactly like we do
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Meta’s new glasses have twice the battery life, but they still have the tricky issue of being a camera right on your face.
Last October it introduced facial scans to spot ads scamming users with fake celebrity endorsements, now the same tech will look out for impostor accounts. It’s switching on for Facebook in the EU and UK, with Instagram to follow. No-one tell the arm of the company in charge of celebrity lookalike chatbots, alright?
Current AI spending means the industry needs $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, according to estimates from Bain & Co. That’s “more than five times the size of the entire global subscription software market,” write Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan. But there’s a plan: 1. Build data centers. 2. ???? 3. Profit. Anyway, I’ve been wondering about this for a while now.
