Meta Platforms has rebranded its Quest VR operating system Horizon OS and is opening the platform to third parties. While licensing terms have not been publicly disclosed, Asus and Lenovo have said they’re going to be designing hardware using the system. Microsoft and Qualcomm are also in round one of the companies on the inside track as Meta positions Horizon OS along the lines of a universal VR standard, not unlike Microsoft’s Windows OS for computers. All four companies have already been working with Meta on VR for Quest or its predecessor, Oculus. Continue reading Meta Opens Mixed Reality OS to Third-Party Hardware Makers

Pursuant to his goal of “building the world’s leading AI,” Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that Meta AI is upgrading to Llama 3 concurrent with a rollout of its open-source chatbot across the company’s social platforms, integrating it into the search boxes atop WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. There is also a website, meta.ai, for those who prefer browser access. Reports of Meta upgrading its social AI capabilities began leaking out early last week, albeit on a more limited test scale than what Zuckerberg announced, which, excepting Threads, is cross-platform. Continue reading Meta AI Assistant Is Launching Across Platforms with Llama 3

Meta’s next generation AI silicon is a 5nm chip designed to power the models that provide recommendations to those who use its social network platforms. The new MTIA inference accelerator is part of a “broader full-stack development program for custom, domain-specific silicon that addresses our unique workloads and systems,” Meta says. The next-gen MTIA more than doubles the compute and memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the 7nm MTIA v1 chip introduced in May 2023, resulting in 3x the performance, according to Meta, which says the new silicon is already live in 16 data centers. Continue reading Meta Deploys Gen 2 MTIA AI Accelerator Chip in Data Centers

Nvidia unveiled what it is calling the world’s most powerful AI processing system, the Blackwell GPU, purpose built to power real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at what the company says will be up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessors. Blackwell’s capabilities will usher in what the company promises will be a new era in generative AI computing. News from Nvidia’s GTC 2024 developer conference included the NIM software platform, purpose built to streamline the setup of custom and pre-trained AI models in a production environment, and the DGX SuperPOD server, powered by Blackwell. Continue reading GTC: Nvidia Unveils Blackwell GPU for Trillion-Parameter LLMs

Decentralized social platform Bluesky has open-sourced a tool called Ozone that facilitates custom moderation. Debuting this week, Ozone lets individuals or teams collaboratively review and label content on the platform. “We’re opening up the ability to run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app,” the company says, explaining “you’ll be able to create and subscribe to additional moderation services” on top of that which is administered by Bluesky’s moderation team, “giving you unprecedented control over your social media experience.” Continue reading Ozone Helps Users Customize Content Moderation on Bluesky

Facebook chief Tom Alison says parent company Meta Platforms is building a giant AI model that will eventually “power our entire video ecosystem.” Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference this week, Alison said the model will drive the company’s video recommendation engine across all platforms that host long-form video as well as the short-form Reels, which are limited to 90 seconds. Alison said the company began experimenting with the new, super-sized AI model last year and found that it helped improve Facebook’s Reels watch time by anywhere from 8-10 percent. Continue reading Meta Building Giant AI Model to Power Entire Video Ecosystem

Users appear to prefer Meta Platforms’ Threads to Elon Musk’s social platform X, based on the disparity between the number of downloads, which is widening. Globally, Meta’s Instagram spinoff — which has many of the same features as the app formerly known as Twitter — has recently been seeing three times as many daily downloads as X on iOS devices, and more than twice as many from the Google Play app store for Android. The analysis is from intelligence firm Appfigures, which this week lists Threads as No. 2 among all free app downloads, and X at No. 40. As Threads introduces new features, it is also testing a new in-app camera. Continue reading Threads Surpasses X in Downloads, Tests an In-App Camera

Instagram’s Threads app, an X competitor designed for sharing text updates and joining public conversations, is now gaining traction after an inconsistent 2023. New data from app intelligence firm Appfigures reveals that Threads is growing, tripling its number of downloads month-over-month in December, positioning it as one of the Top 10 most downloaded apps for Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store. Ahead of Threads in downloads for December were popular apps such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp (Instagram took over the No. 1 spot from TikTok). Meanwhile, X continues to decline. Continue reading Instagram Threads Reaches the Top of App Store Downloads

In a Threads post last week, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s new frontier is open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI). Meta has united its FAIR and GenAI research teams behind the goal of developing such a platform, which Zuckerberg described as part of the company’s “long-term vision.” “The next generation of services required is building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that will require “advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.” Continue reading Meta Combines Research Units to Develop Open-Source AGI

Meta Platforms has reportedly been investing billions of dollars each quarter in developing the metaverse, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as the future of the company. Although sales of VR headsets and AR glasses dropped nearly 40 percent in the U.S. (according to research firm Circana), Meta continues to tout the intersection between AI and the metaverse. “The progress we made in 2023 means generative AI is making its way into the heart of the world’s most popular apps, mixed reality is now at the core of a mass market headset, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will let AI see the world from our perspective for the first time,” explained Andrew Bosworth, CTO and head of Meta’s Reality Labs. Continue reading Meta Platforms Continues Its Pursuit of AI and the Metaverse

After introducing the Chat Lock feature in May, WhatsApp has added something called “secret code,” for an additional layer of privacy protection for extremely sensitive conversations. A secret code makes sensitive chats “harder to find if someone has access to your phone or you share a phone with someone else,” the Meta Platforms subsidiary says. With a secret code, users can set a unique password — different from that which normally unlocks the phone — to give locked chats an extra layer of privacy. An additional option allows the Locked Chats folder to be hidden from the general chatlist. Continue reading WhatsApp Rolls Out ‘Secret Codes’ Privacy for Locked Chats

Threads, the Twitter competitor launched in July by Meta Platforms to record-breaking numbers, has added features that make it easier for users to separate their Threads feeds from Instagram and Facebook. Users can now delete their Threads accounts separate from Instagram, something that previously confounded users. Because those signing up for Threads were required to do so either from their existing or a new Instagram account, the two were entwined. Instagram/Threads CEO Adam Mosseri also announced that propagation of Threads posts to Instagram and Facebook can now be turned off, to keep discussions separate. Continue reading Threads Lets Users Delete Accounts Separate from Instagram

A second Meta Platforms whistleblower has come forward, testifying this week before a Senate subcommittee that the company’s social networks were potentially harming teens, and his warnings to that effect were ignored by top leadership. Arturo Bejar, from 2009 to 2015 a Facebook engineering director and an Instagram consultant from 2019 to 2021, told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and Law that Meta officials failed to take steps to protect underage users on the platforms. Bejar follows former Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who provided explosive Senate testimony in 2021. Continue reading Second Meta Whistleblower Testifies to Potential Child Harm

Key highlights from this week’s two-day Meta Connect virtual event include details about the Quest 3 mixed reality headset, the latest smart glasses from its Ray-Ban collaboration, and an announcement that AI stickers are rolling out across the Meta Platforms apps. Starting at $500, the Meta Quest 3 will add Microsoft 365 apps integration by the end of the year, for those who want to use the gaming headset for productivity. Available for preorder now, the Quest 3 ships October 10. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses start at $299 and ship October 17. Continue reading Meta Shows Off Quest 3 and Smart Glasses at Connect 2023

The first U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum was a lively event, with xAI’s Elon Musk calling for a federal department of artificial intelligence while Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg emphasized a need for transparency and Google’s Sundar Pichai stressed AI’s potential to improve the human condition with regard to things like health and energy. The three-hour meeting was organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) who said the crash course would address both how AI “enriches our world and opens the door to new prosperity” and how society can “minimize the very real risks.” Continue reading Tech Titans Convene in Washington for First AI Insight Forum