Meta

King, who might be partially responsible for the original $8 starting price for Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue (now X Premium), is leaving for Threads. Here’s his Threads profile.

Zuck worked with T-Pain on a new version of “Get Low,” but the song initially wasn’t playing for me and some Verge colleagues on his Instagram carousel.

Now, the song works for me on iOS, but not on desktop. Meta spokesperson Sienna La Rocca confirms that this isn’t a copyright issue, however.

Update: The song is working on iOS but not on desktop.

In the coming days, Instagram and Facebook users within the bloc will be given the choice to receive “less personalized ads” that are full-screen and temporarily unskippable, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The offering, which Meta says is likely to negatively impact its business, follows pressure from European Union regulators who opposed users having to pay to avoid targeted ads.

Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi dug up a menu within the app showing the option to “create An AI profile picture.” While you can already upload an AI-generated profile picture to Instagram, this would streamline the process.

Meta’s other apps — Facebook and WhatsApp — have been spotted working on a similar feature.

Over the weekend, several Threads users noticed seemingly random, out-of-context posts on their feeds — only to realize they were replies without the original post attached.

Fortunately, it looks like a fix may be on the way, as Instagram engineer Seth Kinast says the company is “investigating” the apparent bug.

“Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. “The onus will be on social media platforms to demonstrate they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access. The onus won’t be on parents or young people. There’ll be no penalties for users.”

Legislation will be introduced this month and would come into force 12 months after ratification.

Caitlin Kalinowski will lead robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, according to a post on LinkedIn. Kalinowski also worked at Apple as a hardware product design engineer.

Jony Ive — also, famously, formerly of Apple — recently confirmed that he’s working with on an AI hardware project with OpenAI.

Meta originally planned to lift its ban on new election ads at the end of the day Tuesday, but now Axios reports that the company will continue blocking ads for several days after voting ends “to prevent any confusion or misinformation from spreading.”

Meta wanted to build a nuclear-powered AI data center in the US — until a rare species of bee was found at the site, according to the Financial Times.

Tech giants have inked a string of nuclear energy deals lately to try to meet growing electricity demand for AI data centers.

Instagram is adding more filters for the inbox so creators can sort through endless DM requests. The update includes a way to filter by account type (verified accounts, businesses, etc.) and to sort by recency or the number of followers the sender has.

Square Enix’s strategy game is out now for Meta’s Quest headsets. Based on a trailer, VR seems like an interesting way to take in the battlefield.

And if you were wondering, the game’s developers know it has a weird name.

Forbes reports that advertisers have paid Meta more than $1 million to place hundreds of ads promoting lies about the upcoming presidential election. The ads are running despite Meta’s own rules against election misinformation, including posts that “call into question the legitimacy of an upcoming or ongoing election.”

Researchers at Meta have revealed the Meta Digit 360, an artificial fingertip with “human-level” touch capabilities. Meta says it uses on-device AI to respond to different inputs, like the prick of a needle or the flex of a tennis ball.

Jay Parikh, who built Meta’s engineering culture when it was Facebook, is joining Microsoft. Parikh will report directly to CEO Satya Nadella and join Microsoft’s senior leadership team. In a memo to staff, Nadella says Parikh’s expertise will “bring valuable perspective to Microsoft.” It’s not clear what Parikh’s official title will be, nor what he’s directly working on. I’m sure it’ll have something to do with AI, though.

Meta’s X.com competitor now has 275 million monthly users, up from 200 million in August, according to Mark Zuckerberg. On Meta’s Q3 earnings call just now, he says Threads is seeing more than one million sign-ups per day and is on track to becoming “our next major social app.”

The time people spend in Threads “also continues to grow,” and Meta is working to “make it easier to stay up to date on topics,” adds CFO Susan Li.

Katie Notopoulos over at Business Insider used Meta’s personal chatbot feature to create a bot of herself trained on her posts — and its main personality trait, she says, was “millennial cringe.” There’s also an incredible follow-up when Katie realizes her bot has been trained on her Threads posts, which are overrun with rage bait.

The New York Times just ran a story diving into how AnPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio turned Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses to identify people in real-time earlier this month. As the headline states — it wasn’t hard, and that’s the chilling part.