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.
A new Llama 3.3 70B model dropped today, and Meta’s VP of genAI said it matches the performance of the larger 405B version, but runs cheaper and lighter. They also claimed this new model beats competitors Google, OpenAI, and Amazon on key tests like MMLU.
Competitors also really love overlapping their AI announcements — Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI have all dropped announcements this week.
“Now that your posts will be shown to more people who follow you, it’s especially important to understand what’s resonating with your existing audience,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says.
Meta and Lightstorm Vision’s partnership will help “scale the creation of world-class 3D entertainment experiences spanning live sports and concerts, feature films, and TV series featuring big-name IP on Meta Quest — which will be Lightstorm Vision’s exclusive MR hardware platform,” according to a Meta blog post. Cameron says it’s a multi-year partnership.
As AI companies vie for more processing power, Meta announced its largest data center yet in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Construction will start in December and will continue through 2030.
An update to the Threads app lets users switch between their various feeds on the home screen, similar to what Bluesky allows.
Over the last few weeks, Threads has rolled out a string of updates that crib from Bluesky, including adding custom feeds.
WhatsApp appears to be testing the ability to follow channels using a QR code, as spotted by WABetaInfo. As the outlet notes, QR codes could make discovery easier for businesses, for example, to share their channel with customers quickly by displaying their QR code in a store or on marketing materials.
Filed in 2020, the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta accuses the social networking giant of stifling competition through its acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. The trial will take place on April 14th — just days before a judge will hear the proposed remedies in Google’s antitrust case.
Meta seemed to have bought the domain earlier this year, sometime after it bought the company that owned it prior to the debut of threads.net, where Meta’s Twitter competitor lives.
Previously, visiting the threads.com URL didn’t show anything, but today, it shows... well, an error message. With a “Meta © 2024” and a Facebook logo.
Saw this news on 9to5Mac. I honestly didn’t know landscape video wasn’t previously possible.
“This year alone, we’ve taken down over two million accounts linked to scam centers in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines,” Meta says.
The scams typically involve a scammer (who is sometimes a forced laborer) building trust with someone, asking them for money, and then disappearing.
This seems very useful!
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. John James (R-MI) are prepping a new bill granting Meta’s wish of putting the onus for age verification on app store operators, The Washington Post reports. Parents could reportedly sue those companies if their kids are exposed to things like sexual material, but businesses could shield themselves by implementing age verification.
[The Washington Post]
It will be headed up by Clara Shih, who was most recently the CEO of Salesforce AI, Axios reports.
Meta’s designers promised Fast Company they’re not trying to turn smart glasses into a hellscape of advertising and distraction:
“We’re all haunted by the Hyper Reality video... And I think that we see it as a huge responsibility. Every pixel that we light up should be worth its weight in gold.”
If any company were excitedly planning to build that hellscape, it’d be Meta, so I’ll take the win. And if you haven’t watched Hyper-Reality yet, it’s fabulous. And horrifying.
Meta has been working on improving the Windows VR experience with its Quest headsets in recent months, and now Microsoft says the full capabilities of Windows 11 are coming to the Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S in December. You’ll be able to have a large multiple-monitor workstation through Quest 3 headsets in public preview next month.
We’re still waiting to hear when Windows Volumetric Apps will be available, though.
Owners of the smart glasses in France, Italy, Ireland, and Spain will get Meta AI features starting today, the company announced.
For now, Meta AI can answer general questions, but it won’t get multimodal features like using the Ray-Bans’ camera to tell you about things you see — the company has called the EU regulatory environment too “unpredictable” to do that right now.
