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Mark Zuckerberg’s charity U-turns, ends DEI efforts 

Mark Zuckerberg’s charity has eliminated its DEI programs and efforts just weeks after assuring staff it would continue supporting DEI efforts, the Guardian reports.  The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), co-founded by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, will end internal DEI programs and no longer provide “social advocacy funding,” which provided grants for racial equity and…

Court filings show Meta paused efforts to license books for AI training

New court filings in an AI copyright case against Meta add credence to earlier reports that the company “paused” discussions with book publishers on licensing deals to supply some of its generative AI models with training data. The filings are related to the case Kadrey v. Meta Platforms — one of many such cases winding through…

Meta’s next big bet may be humanoid robotics

Meta is forming a new team within its Reality Labs hardware division to build robots that can assist with physical tasks, Bloomberg reported. The team will be responsible for developing humanoid robotics hardware, potentially including hardware that can perform household chores. Meta’s new robotics group, which will be led by Marc Whitten, driverless car startup…

Arm is launching its own chip this year with Meta as a customer

Public semiconductor company Arm will start making its own chips this year after landing a high-profile enterprise customer. Arm, which is majorly owned by SoftBank, will start making its own chips now that Meta has signed on as a customer, according to the Financial Times. The chip is expected to be a CPU for servers…

Report: Meta in talks to acquire AI chip firm FuriosaAI

Meta is reportedly in talks to acquire a South Korean chip firm as the social media giant looks to bolster its AI hardware infrastructure. Meta may announce its intent to purchase FuriosaAI, a chip startup founded by former Samsung and AMD employees, as soon as this month, per Forbes. FuriosaAI develops chips that speed up…

How to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

In the wake of Meta’s decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been on the rise. People who are angry with the decision accuse Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of cozying up to the Trump administration at the expense of…

AI-driven ads take the field during the 2025 Super Bowl

We’ve officially experienced an AI Super Bowl, people. As everyone tuned in to watch the annual championship game, the biggest buzz wasn’t just about the Eagles’ blowout win and Kendrick Lamar performing his Grammy-winning diss track at the halftime show. It was also about AI being a consistent theme in several of the multi-million dollar ad…

Ex-Meta employee sues for sexual harassment

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re diving into Google quietly removing its pledge to not build AI weapons for surveillance; how Elon Musk and DOGE are facilitating the biggest breach of U.S. government data; researchers who were able to re-create a premium “reasoning” model for $50; and more! Let’s get into it.…

Meta launches new program to improve speech and translation AI

Meta is launching a new program in partnership with UNESCO to collect speech recordings and transcriptions the company said will help the development of future openly available AI. The program, the Language Technology Partner Program, is seeking collaborators who can contribute more than 10 hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large amounts of written text,…

Meta is studying how humans and robots can collaborate on housework

Meta Friday announced PARTNR, a new program designed to study human-robot interaction (HRI). The research is specifically focused on how humans and robots might collaborate in the home environment. That includes mundane tasks like cleaning, cooking, and picking up food deliveries. Automated housework is a decades-old dream, most prominently captured by The Jetsons’ Rosie. The…

Early Meta employee sues for sexual harassment, gender discrimination  

One of Meta’s earliest employees is suing the company for sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and retaliation, according to a lawsuit filed this week in the state of Washington. Kelly Stonelake, who spent 15 years at the company and rose to the rank of director, alleges in the lawsuit she faced a cycle of gender-based discrimination…

Mark Zuckerberg’s charity insists its not abandoning its DEI efforts

Mark Zuckerberg’s charity has told its employees it will remain committed to DEI even as Meta eliminates its DEI programs, The Guardian reports.  Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), founded and co-led by Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, reassured its employees after many began expressing concerns about recent changes at Meta as the company scales back…

Spyware maker Paragon confirms U.S. government is a customer

Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions confirmed to TechCrunch that it sells its products to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries. Paragon’s executive chairman John Fleming said in a statement to TechCrunch on Tuesday that, “Paragon licenses its technology to a select group of global democracies — principally, the United States and its allies.”…

Challenging Bluesky, Threads now allows for public custom feeds

Meta’s Threads is doubling down on support for custom feeds as it faces challenges from the growing social network Bluesky, now with over 30 million users, which also offers custom feeds as one of its key features. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that users can now set their custom feeds to be public…

Meta says it may stop development of AI systems it deems too risky

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to make artificial general intelligence (AGI) — which is roughly defined as AI that can accomplish any task a human can — openly available one day. But in a new policy document, Meta suggests that there are certain scenarios in which it may not release a highly capable AI…

Threads adds a ‘media’ tab and the ability to tag people in photos

Meta’s newer social network Threads announced on Thursday that it’s introducing a dedicated “media” tab for both photos and videos, only days after its rivals, including X (formerly Twitter) and the startup Bluesky, did the same for videos. In addition, Meta will also now allow users to tag people in the photos they share. Instagram…

Mark Zuckerberg teases a 2025 return to ‘OG Facebook’

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased a “return to OG Facebook” as part of his key goals for 2025 in Wednesday’s Q4 earnings call with investors. While the company was short on details as to what specific changes lay in store, it’s clear that Meta is in desperate need of younger Facebook users to sustain itself…

Meta says end of fact-checking hasn’t impacted ad spend

Meta says its controversial decision to put an end to its fact-checking program hasn’t impacted advertiser spend. On its Q4 2024 call, Meta CFO Susan Li assured investors that advertiser demand remains strong and the company’s commitment to brand safety remains unchanged, despite the new measures. Meanwhile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that the community notes…

Threads adds another 20M monthly users since December, reaching 320M

Threads, Meta’s microblogging service, is growing at a fast pace as users gravitate to the app over rivals like X. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings presentation on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Threads now has 320 million monthly active users (MAUs), up from 300 million last month. The app had 275 million monthly active…

Instagram gives creators more insight into their reels’ performance

Meta continues to target creators in the days following the U.S. TikTok ban. In addition to paying TikTok creators big bonuses to publish reels, Instagram announced on Wednesday that it’s introducing new ways for creators to better understand how their short videos are performing. The platform is introducing additional metrics that allow creators to see…

OpenAI wants to take over your browser

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week we’re diving into OpenAI’s newly released AI agent, called Operator. We also look at where TikTok stands after being resuscitated, whether it’s time to go back to Tumblr, and more! Let’s get into it. OpenAI launched a research preview of Operator, a general-purpose AI agent that can…

Open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp raise funds on Kickstarter

The developer behind Pixelfed, Loops, and Sup, open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp, respectively, is now raising funds on Kickstarter to fuel the apps’ further development. The trio is part of the growing open social web, also known as the fediverse, powered by the same ActivityPub protocol used by X alternative Mastodon. The…

The EU wants to talk to US tech companies ahead of Germany’s upcoming election

The European Union will give tech and social media companies a “stress test” to see how they handle misinformation ahead of Germany’s election next month. European Commission officials have invited tech companies, including: X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, to a meeting on January 31, according to multiple news outlets. During this meeting,…

Trump’s not happy with how EU regulators have treated US tech giants

President Donald Trump isn’t happy with how European Union regulators have treated U.S.-based tech companies including: Google, Meta, and Apple. On stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump put EU regulators on blast. He said that the EU’s cases against these U.S. tech companies are “a form of taxation,” according to Bloomberg reporting.…

Meta’s Yann LeCun predicts a ‘new AI architectures paradigm’ within 5 years and ‘decade of robotics’

Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, says that a “new paradigm of AI architectures” will emerge in the next three to five years, going far beyond the capabilities of existing AI systems. LeCun also predicted that the coming years could be the “decade of robotics,” where advances in AI and robotics combine to unlock a…

WhatsApp wins reprieve in India over user data sharing

An Indian tribunal on Thursday suspended restrictions that would have barred WhatsApp from sharing user data with its parent company Meta, delivering a significant victory for Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire in its largest market by users. The ruling by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal temporarily lifts a five-year ban imposed by India’s antitrust…

How to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

In the wake of Meta’s decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been on the rise. People who are angry with the decision accuse Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of cozying up to the Trump administration at the expense of…

Databricks closes $15.3B financing at $62B valuation, Meta joins as ‘strategic investor’

Data analytics platform Databricks has confirmed that it has closed a previously announced $10 billion in Series J equity financing at a $62 billion valuation. The San Francisco-based company also added a further $5.25 billion in debt financing, funded by JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, among other “leading financial institutions and alternative…

Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg sanctioned by judge for allegedly deleting emails

A Delaware judge has sanctioned Sheryl Sandberg, Meta’s former COO and board member, for allegedly deleting emails related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. The decision arises from a case Meta shareholders brought against Sandberg and another former Meta board member, Jeff Zients, late last year. The plaintiffs alleged that Sandberg and Zients used personal…

Meta is building Oakley smart glasses for athletes: report

Meta’s Reality Labs is expanding its lineup of AI smart glasses with a new pair of Oakley-branded spectacles targeted at athletes, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Bloomberg reports the new smart glasses, with which Meta seeks to capitalize on the Ray-Ban Meta’s success, will be based on Oakley’s Sphaera glasses, and will shift the camera…

Meta will soon let you link your WhatsApp account with Instagram and Facebook

Meta announced on Tuesday that users will soon be able to add their WhatsApp account to their Accounts Center, a hub where users can manage connected experiences across their Facebook, Instagram, and Meta Quest accounts. With this integration, users will be able to cross-post their WhatsApp Status as Stories on Instagram and Facebook, getting rid…

Meta confirms it will keep fact-checkers outside the U.S. ‘for now’

Meta says it plans to keep its fact-checking program in place outside the U.S. for the time being, though it could eventually expand it elsewhere. “We’ll see how that goes as we move it out over the years,” Meta’s head of global business Nicola Mendelsohn told Bloomberg in a report from Davos on Monday. “So…

Instagram Reels rolls out new features for U.S. users as TikTok is banned

Instagram announced a timely update to its video feature Reels this morning, alongside the news that the Supreme Court upheld the law that will ban TikTok in the U.S. on January 19. The update, says Meta, will make it easier for users to discover the content that friends and followers are liking on the platform…

Threads might let you add music to your posts in the future

Meta’s Threads is internally prototyping the ability to add music to posts, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The option to add music to posts is already available on Meta’s other social apps, Instagram and Facebook. It looks like the company is now thinking about bringing the feature to Threads, its X competitor. The feature isn’t…

In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube and its battle to take down pirated content to defend his own company’s use of a data set containing copyrighted e-books to train AI models, newly released snippets of his deposition reveals.  The deposition, which was part of a complaint submitted to the court by plaintiffs’…

Meta execs obsessed over beating OpenAI’s GPT-4 internally, court filings reveal

Executives and researchers leading Meta’s AI efforts obsessed over beating OpenAI’s GPT-4 model while developing Llama 3, according to internal messages unsealed by a court on Tuesday in one of the company’s ongoing AI copyright cases, Kadrey v. Meta. “Honestly… Our goal needs to be GPT-4,” said Meta’s VP of Generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, in…

Meta to cut roughly 5% of its workforce based on performance

Meta is reducing its workforce by about 5% through performance-based terminations, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The company plans to hire new people to fill the roles, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal memo to staff. “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in the note. “We…

WhatsApp is adding a way to turn selfies into stickers

WhatsApp is adding new features including creating new stickers from selfies, sharing sticker packs, and adding new camera effects. Stickers and camera effects are good engagement ploys to keep users interacting with their contacts. The chat app added the ability to create custom stickers from photos last year. Now, the company is adding an option…

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are slamming Meta over its fact-checking policy

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have joined the ranks of those displeased with Meta’s changes to fact-checking and have released a statement saying that the changes “directly underminds free speech.”  “Meta’s changes to its ‘Hateful Content Policies’ do not protect free expression but instead foster an environment where abuse and hate speech silence and threaten…

Mark Zuckerberg defends Meta’s latest pivot in three-hour Joe Rogan interview

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to scale back Meta’s content moderation policies in a Friday appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Zuckerberg faced widespread criticism for the decision, including from employees inside his own company. “Probably depends on who you ask,” said Zuckerberg when asked how Meta’s updates have been received. The key updates…

How to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

In the wake of Meta’s decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been on the rise. People who are angry with the decision accuse Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of cozying up to the incoming Trump administration at the expense…

Meta eliminates DEI programs

Axios reports that Meta is eliminating its biggest DEI efforts, effective immediately, including ones that focused on hiring a diverse workforce, training, and sourcing supplies from diverse-owned companies. Its DEI department will also be eliminated.   In a memo leaked to the outlet, Meta said it was making these changes because the “legal and policy landscape…

Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims

Counsel for plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit filed against Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company’s Llama AI models to use a data set of pirated ebooks and articles for training. The case, Kadrey v. Meta, is one of many against tech giants developing AI…

Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram explode after Meta ends fact-checking

Google searches for how to cancel and delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts have seen explosive rises in the U.S. since Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will end its third-party fact-checking system, loosen content moderation policies, and roll back previous limits to the amount of political content in user feeds.  Experts see…

Mastodon CEO calls Meta’s moderation changes ‘deeply troubling,’ warns users cross-posting from Threads

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko has spoken out about the significant moderation changes announced by Meta on Tuesday, which will see the social networking giant removing fact-checking across its apps in favor of a crowdsourced community notes feature, similar to X’s. The Mastodon founder, whose app competes with X and Meta’s X rival, Instagram Threads, called…

Facebook Marketplace to display eBay listings to appease EU regulators

Meta is set to start displaying eBay listings in its own Facebook Marketplace classifieds platform, in an effort to appease European regulators. Back in November, Meta was hit with a €798 million fine by the European Commission (EC) in Europe for breaching antitrust rules. The EC contended that Meta created “unfair trading conditions” by connecting…

Threads prototypes custom display names and cover images for profiles

Instagram Threads is developing new features that would bring its user experience more in line with that of X (formerly Twitter) and the social network Bluesky. The Meta-owned company is internally prototyping the ability to set a display name and add a cover image to profiles. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to TechCrunch on…

Meta to phase back in political content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads

As a part of a significant overhaul of its content moderation policies announced on Tuesday, Meta admitted that its approach to limiting political content across its platforms had been “pretty blunt” and would now be addressed. The company said it would once again phase in political content into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, allowing people who…

Meta drops fact-checking and loosens its content moderation rules

Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, today announced a major overhaul in how it’s handling content moderation on its site, taking off some of the guardrails that it had put in place over the last several years in response to criticism that it had helped to spread political and health misinformation. In a…

Judge grants ruling in favor of WhatsApp against spyware firm NSO Group

A federal judge has dealt the first major legal blow against spyware maker NSO Group, ruling in favor of WhatsApp in a five-year-old lawsuit against the Israeli firm over allegations that it hacked the chat service. Northern California District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton made her ruling on Friday as a summary judgment, thus not requiring…

Instagram tests a way to show you Story Highlights you didn’t get a chance to see

Instagram is testing a way for you to see content from friends that you might have missed. The social network has started displaying unseen Story Highlights from a user’s mutual followers at the end of the Stories tray, which is the area at the top of your feed where you see Stories from your friends.…

OpenAI announces new o3 model — but you can’t use it yet

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re looking at OpenAI’s last — and biggest — announcement from its “12 Days of OpenAI” event; Apple’s potential entrance into the foldable market; and why Databricks is choosing to wait to go public. Let’s get into it. P.S. We’re off for the holidays! Week in Review…

Instagram teases AI tools for editing appearances, backgrounds in videos using prompts

Instagram head Adam Mosseri is teasing upcoming generative AI features for the social app that will allow creators to “change nearly any aspect” of their videos using text prompts. The editing tools will be powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model, and are expected to launch on the social network sometime next year, Mosseri said…

Microsoft bought nearly 500,000 Nvidia Hopper chips this year

Microsoft bought more than twice as many Nvidia Hopper chips this year than any of its biggest rivals. The tech giant bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper chips across 2024 according to reporting from the Financial Times, which cited data from tech consultancy Omdia. To compare, Meta bought 224,000 of the same, flagship Nvidia chip this year.…

Threads is testing a post scheduling feature

Meta’s social network Threads is experimenting with a feature that will let you schedule posts, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said. Users who will get to test this feature won’t be able to schedule replies. “We want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversations,” he said. People…

Mark Zuckerberg says Threads now has 100M daily active users

Meta’s X rival Threads is growing steadily with more than 100 million people using the service daily, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday. Zuckerberg also noted that Threads now has 300 million monthly active users, up from 275 million monthly active users in November. While Meta has regularly released updated numbers about monthly active…

Meta updates its smart glasses with real-time AI video

Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are getting several new AI-powered upgrades, including the ability to have an ongoing conversation and translate between languages. Ray-Ban Meta owners in Meta’s early access program for the U.S. and Canada can now download firmware v11, which adds “live AI.” First unveiled this fall, live AI lets wearers continuously converse…

What is Instagram’s Threads app? All your questions answered

Twitter alternatives — new and old — have found audiences willing to try out a newer social networks since Elon Musk took over the company in 2022. Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill and T2 are some of the social media platforms people are among them. So is Meta’s Threads platform. What is Threads? How do you create…

Meta asks California AG to block OpenAI’s conversion to for-profit

Facebook’s parent company Meta is supporting Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s conversion from a non-profit company into a for-profit one. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Meta sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta arguing that allowing the shift would have “seismic implications for Silicon Valley.” And while the company asked…

WhatsApp lets you select specific people within a group to start a group call without disturbing anyone

WhatsApp announced that it had added new video calling features just before the holidays, including participant selection for group video calls, better resolution, and a revamped call tab on the desktop. This is another step from Meta in making WhatsApp a viable option for both personal and work calls instead of using Google Meet or…

Nearly half of US teens are online almost constantly, Pew study finds

Nearly half of teens in the U.S. are online almost constantly, and the platform they’re using the most is YouTube, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found. The center reports that 46% of teens say they’re online “almost constantly,” and 90% of teens it surveyed said they use the Google-owned video platform,…

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