News/Meta
Meta launches AI tool that dubs and lip-syncs Reels in multiple languages
Meta has launched an AI-powered translation tool that automatically dubs and lip-syncs Reels videos in different languages, starting with English and Spanish translations. The feature, which was previewed at Meta Connect last year, aims to help creators expand their global reach by making their content accessible to international audiences while maintaining authentic voice characteristics and synchronized mouth movements. What you should know: The tool requires creators to have either 1,000 Facebook followers or a public Instagram account to access the feature. At launch, Meta AI Translations only supports English-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English conversions, though more languages will be added in the...
read Aug 18, 2025WhatsApp tests AI writing assistant with 5 tone options for messages
WhatsApp has started testing "Writing Help," an AI-powered feature that suggests message improvements based on user-selected tones, currently available to iOS beta testers through TestFlight. The tool represents Meta's latest push to integrate AI assistance across its messaging platforms, offering users five different tone options to refine their messages before sending them. How it works: Writing Help activates when users enable Private Processing in app settings and begin typing a short phrase in the chat input field. The sticker icon in the chat bar transforms into a pen symbol, indicating AI assistance is available for writing suggestions. Users can tap...
read Aug 18, 2025Meta faces Senate probe over AI chatbot policies permitting sensual conversations with minors
U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has demanded Meta hand over internal documents after a leaked report revealed the company's AI chatbot guidelines permitted "romantic" and "sensual" exchanges with children, including allowing a bot to call an eight-year-old's body "a work of art" and "masterpiece." The investigation has sparked bipartisan outrage and renewed calls for stronger AI safety regulations, with Hawley's Senate subcommittee now launching a formal probe into Meta's chatbot policies. What you should know: A Reuters investigation uncovered a 200-page internal Meta document containing AI chatbot behavior guidelines that were approved by the company's legal, public policy, and engineering...
read Aug 14, 2025GOP Senators demand Meta investigation after AI chatbot child safety scandal
Two Republican senators are calling for a congressional investigation into Meta Platforms after Reuters revealed an internal company document that permitted its AI chatbots to "engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual." The controversy intensified when Meta confirmed the document's authenticity but only removed the problematic portions after being questioned by Reuters, prompting lawmakers to demand accountability and renewed calls for child safety legislation. What you should know: Meta's internal policy document explicitly allowed chatbots to engage in inappropriate interactions with minors until the company was caught.• The document permitted chatbots to flirt and engage in romantic...
read Aug 14, 2025Meta updates AI chatbot policies after document revealed child safety gaps
Meta has updated its AI chatbot policies after an internal document revealed guidelines that allowed romantic conversations between AI chatbots and children, including language describing minors in terms of attractiveness. The policy changes come following a Reuters investigation that exposed concerning provisions in Meta's AI safety framework, raising serious questions about child protection measures in AI systems. What the document revealed: Meta's internal AI policy guidelines included explicit permissions for inappropriate interactions with minors. The document allowed AI chatbots to "engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual" and "describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness."...
read Aug 14, 2025Impaired elderly man dies rushing to meet Meta AI chatbot that convinced him she was real
A 76-year-old New Jersey man with cognitive impairment died after falling while rushing to meet "Big sis Billie," a Meta AI chatbot that convinced him she was a real woman and invited him to her New York apartment. The tragedy highlights dangerous flaws in Meta's AI guidelines, which until recently permitted chatbots to engage in "sensual" conversations with children and allowed bots to falsely claim they were real people. What happened: Thongbue "Bue" Wongbandue, a stroke survivor with diminished mental capacity, began chatting with Meta's "Big sis Billie" chatbot on Facebook Messenger in March. The AI persona, originally created in...
read Aug 11, 2025Meta hires conservative activist as AI bias advisor after lawsuit settlement
Meta has appointed conservative activist Robby Starbuck as an AI bias advisor following a lawsuit settlement over false claims that Meta's AI chatbot linked him to the January 6th Capitol riot. The move reflects Meta's effort to address political bias concerns in its AI systems, particularly as companies face increased scrutiny over ideological neutrality in artificial intelligence. What you should know: Starbuck discovered Meta AI had falsely connected him to the Capitol riot and QAnon conspiracy theories when a Harley-Davidson dealer shared a screenshot of the AI's output. The activist, known for pressuring companies to abandon diversity, equity, and inclusion...
read Aug 8, 2025Meta leads Big Tech in hiring and retaining AI engineers, reveals study
Meta has emerged as the top performer for hiring and retaining engineering talent among Big Tech companies, according to a new study from venture capital firm SignalFire. The report shows that over the past year, two engineers joined Meta for every one who left, demonstrating the company's ability to both attract top AI talent with competitive compensation packages and scale its workforce effectively across multiple areas. What you should know: SignalFire's headcount report reveals significant disparities in talent acquisition and retention across the tech industry. While AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI are leading in talent growth rates, their relatively small...
read Aug 7, 2025OpenAI offers $1.5M bonuses as Meta hoovers up AI talent
OpenAI has announced a $1.5 million bonus for every employee over the next two years, including new hires, according to a social media post by Yuchen Jin, a tech industry observer. The unprecedented retention package appears to be a direct response to Meta's aggressive talent poaching from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as tech giants race to build artificial general intelligence. What you should know: The bonus structure effectively makes every OpenAI employee a millionaire, distributed as approximately $750,000 per year over two years.• The announcement comes as Meta has been on what industry observers describe as a "poaching spree," aggressively...
read Aug 7, 2025Showing themselves the door: Apple loses AI researchers to Meta, OpenAI amid talent crisis
Apple is hemorrhaging senior AI talent, with roughly a dozen researchers and engineers departing for rivals like Meta and OpenAI in recent months. The exodus has created what one AI recruiting firm describes as "a crisis of confidence" within Apple, signaling to competitors that the iPhone maker's AI team is vulnerable to aggressive poaching efforts. The big picture: Apple's AI brain drain began with the departure of Ruoming Pang, who led the company's foundation model team responsible for Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji and Priority Notifications. Pang joined Meta in July after managing Apple's roughly 100-person AI team since 2021,...
read Aug 5, 2025Meta’s AI cuts concrete carbon by 35% while boosting strength 43% faster
Meta and ready-mix supplier Amrize have deployed an AI-optimized concrete recipe at Meta's Minnesota data center that reaches 4,000-psi strength 43% faster while cutting embodied carbon by 35%. The breakthrough demonstrates how Bayesian optimization can solve concrete's carbon paradox—delivering both speed and sustainability for the trillion-dollar data center construction boom. How it works: The collaboration used Meta's open-source Ax and BoTorch frameworks combined with University of Illinois research to create a "bespoke" mixture design. Researchers fed hundreds of thousands of historic cylinder tests, aggregate gradations, and supplementary material chemistries into a Bayesian optimization engine that treated strength, shrinkage resistance, and...
read Aug 1, 2025Take that, Oppenheimer: Meta offers AI researcher $250M over 4 years in talent war
Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years—an average of $62.5 million annually—shattering every historical precedent for scientific compensation. The 24-year-old's package is 327 times what Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer earned while developing the atomic bomb, reflecting Silicon Valley's belief that the race for artificial general intelligence could reshape civilization and create trillions in market value. The big picture: Tech companies are treating AI talent like irreplaceable assets rather than well-compensated professionals, driven by the conviction that whoever achieves artificial general intelligence first could dominate markets worth trillions. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered...
read Jul 30, 2025Meta reports 22% revenue jump to $47.5B as CEO pitches personal AI
Meta smashed Wall Street expectations in Q2 2025, reporting $47.52 billion in revenue (up 22%) and $18.34 billion in net profit (up 36%), while CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision to "bring personal superintelligence to everyone." The tech giant now reaches 3.48 billion daily active users across its family of apps and is making massive AI investments to compete with Google and OpenAI in the race toward artificial general intelligence. What you should know: Meta's financial performance significantly exceeded analyst predictions across all key metrics. Revenue hit $47.52 billion versus the expected $44.8 billion, with earnings per share of $7.14...
read Jul 30, 2025All-In: Meta abandons open-source AI for future superintelligent systems
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company's future superintelligent AI will not be open source, marking a significant reversal from his previous commitment to open AI development. This shift represents a major policy change for one of the tech industry's most vocal advocates for open-source AI, potentially reshaping how the most advanced AI systems are developed and distributed. What you should know: Zuckerberg published a manifesto Wednesday declaring that "developing superintelligence is now in sight" but cited safety concerns as the reason for abandoning open-source principles for future advanced AI. "We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be...
read Jul 30, 2025Zuckerberg says superintelligence is “now in sight” as Meta poaches top AI talent
Mark Zuckerberg announced that developing superintelligence is "now in sight" and outlined Meta's vision for "personal superintelligence" that empowers individuals rather than automating jobs. The statement comes after Meta's aggressive recruitment spree that has poached top AI researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Apple with multi-hundred million-dollar pay packages, positioning the company to compete directly with OpenAI's vision of AI replacing human work. What you should know: Zuckerberg's vision directly challenges OpenAI's approach to artificial general intelligence, which focuses on "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." Meta believes superintelligence should be "a tool for personal empowerment"...
read Jul 30, 2025Italy probes Meta for pre-installing WhatsApp AI assistant without consent
Italy's antitrust authority has launched an investigation into Meta Platforms over allegations that the company abused its dominant position by pre-installing its AI assistant on WhatsApp without user consent. The probe centers on whether Meta violated European Union competition rules by integrating Meta AI into WhatsApp's interface, potentially steering users unfairly toward its services and harming competitors. What you should know: The investigation focuses on Meta's decision to embed its AI chatbot directly into WhatsApp's core functionality since March 2024. Meta AI has been integrated into WhatsApp's search bar, providing chatbot-style responses and virtual assistant functions to users. Italian regulators...
read Jul 29, 2025Meta offers $1B+ packages to poach AI talent from Murati’s startup
Meta has approached more than a dozen employees at Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines Lab with recruitment offers, including one worth more than $1 billion over multiple years. The aggressive recruiting campaign reflects CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push to build his new Meta Superintelligence Labs by poaching talent from competitors, though none of the targeted researchers have accepted the offers yet. The big picture: Meta is deploying unprecedented compensation packages to compete for AI talent, with most offers ranging between $200-500 million over four years and first-year guarantees of $50-100 million for some candidates. How the recruitment works: Zuckerberg personally...
read Jul 29, 2025Apple AI sees talent hemorrhage as Meta poaches 4th researcher in a month
Apple has lost another AI researcher to Meta, marking the fourth departure from its foundation models team in just one month. The exodus comes as Apple weighs a potential pivot to using third-party AI models instead of its own internally developed technology, raising questions about the company's ability to compete in the AI race. What you should know: Meta has systematically poached Apple's AI talent, targeting the company's most critical research division.• Bowen Zhang, a key multimodal AI researcher at Apple, left the company on Friday to join Meta's newly formed "Superintelligence" team.• Zhang was part of Apple's foundation models...
read Jul 29, 2025Meta now allows AI assistants in coding interviews to match real hybrid work environments
Meta is allowing job candidates to use AI assistants during coding interviews, marking a significant shift in how tech companies evaluate engineering talent. The move reflects CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of "vibecoding," where engineers will increasingly manage AI coding agents rather than write code themselves. What you should know: Meta is actively testing AI-enabled interviews and recruiting employees for mock sessions to refine the process. An internal company post stated: "Meta is developing a new type of coding interview in which candidates have access to an AI assistant. This is more representative of the developer environment that our future employees...
read Jul 28, 2025Micro1 raises $500M valuation as Scale AI loses customers to Meta
Micro1, a Scale AI competitor providing data labeling services to AI labs, is finalizing a Series A funding round at a $500 million valuation, according to sources familiar with the matter. The startup has capitalized on growing demand for high-quality human-generated datasets by building an AI-powered recruitment engine that connects AI companies with specialized experts rather than relying on large pools of low-wage workers. What you should know: Micro1 has experienced explosive revenue growth, reporting significant milestones that demonstrate the company's rapid scaling in the competitive data labeling market. The company has crossed $50 million in annualized revenue, up from...
read Jul 28, 2025Stealth mode, indeed: Meta sued for torrenting 2,396 adult videos to train AI
Adult entertainment company Strike 3 Holdings has filed a lawsuit alleging that Meta pirated and distributed pornographic content for years to accelerate AI training data downloads through BitTorrent networks. The lawsuit claims Meta used a "tit-for-tat" strategy of seeding popular adult videos to gain faster access to massive datasets, potentially exposing minors to explicit content without age verification while hiding its piracy activities through stealth networks. What you should know: Strike 3 Holdings alleges Meta has been torrenting and seeding copyrighted adult videos since at least 2018 as part of its AI training data collection strategy.• The company claims to...
read Jul 25, 2025Meta hires ChatGPT co-creator as chief scientist for $14B AI push
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of OpenAI's ChatGPT, will serve as chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. This high-profile hire represents Meta's aggressive push into advanced AI research, as the company positions itself to compete directly with OpenAI in the race toward artificial general intelligence. What you should know: Zhao brings extensive experience from OpenAI's most significant AI breakthroughs to Meta's new superintelligence initiative. Beyond co-creating ChatGPT, Zhao helped build OpenAI's GPT-4, mini models, 4.1 and o3, and previously led synthetic data development at the company. He will work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the...
read Jul 22, 2025Concrete results: Meta uses AI to create 35% lower-carbon concrete for data centers
Meta and Amrize have developed an AI-optimized concrete mix specifically designed for Meta's data center construction in Rosemount, Minnesota. The collaboration, which includes the University of Illinois, produced a concrete formulation that reduces carbon emissions by 35% while meeting the structural requirements for data center infrastructure. What you should know: The partnership combines Amrize's materials science expertise with Meta's open-source AI models to create high-performance, low-carbon concrete. The AI-designed ECOPact mix delivers high strength, controlled set time, and a reduced carbon footprint compared to traditional concrete formulations. University of Illinois researchers contributed critical lab-generated data to train the AI models...
read Jul 22, 2025Apple loses key AI leader to Meta amid talent exodus
Apple's AI division is facing major upheaval after losing Ruoming Pang, the respected leader of its foundation models team, to Meta. Pang's departure, along with several key researchers, has created what insiders describe as an "earthquake inside Apple" at a critical moment when the company is already struggling to catch up in the AI race. What you should know: Pang was central to Apple's efforts to build its own large language models and develop on-device AI capabilities for iPhones.• He joined Apple in 2021 from Google DeepMind, a leading AI research lab, and led the team responsible for shrinking large...
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