Determined to rebound from the Llama 4 Behemoth delay, Meta Platforms is swinging for the fences in its artificial intelligence efforts, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally supervising creation of a new AI lab focused on superintelligence. Meta has reportedly reached a deal to pay up to $15 billion for a stake in a startup called Scale AI that would bring its 28-year-old co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang in-house to lead the effort. Other leading Scale AI staff would also come aboard, and Meta is said to be recruiting researchers from OpenAI and Google by dangling “seven- to nine-figure compensation packages,” reports indicate. Continue reading Meta Said to Be Planning Major Push into AI Superintelligence

Meta Platforms has restructured its artificial intelligence operations, creating two separate units — an AI Products team headed by Connor Hayes and the AGI Foundations unit jointly run by Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel. The move comes as Meta is delayed getting its latest foundation model Llama 4 Behemoth to market and has also seen several key AI engineers depart. The idea is that dividing a single large organization into two smaller divisions will speed product development and add flexibility as Meta faces tough competition from top companies such as Google and OpenAI, as well as social companies X and TikTok. Continue reading Meta Restructures AI Ops in Wake of Llama 4 Behemoth Delay

Meta Platforms revenue for Q1 was $42.3 billion, up 16 percent year-over-year and besting Wall Street estimates of $41.3 billion. Profits were up 35 percent to $16.6 billion, hurtling past analyst estimates of $13.6 billion. Advertising, up nearly 15 percent for the quarter compared to last year, comfortably passed $41 billion, driving the revenue performance. Meta began Q2 by launching its anticipated standalone Meta AI app. Built with natively multimodal Llama 4 models, the company is positioning the Meta AI app as “a personal AI designed around voice conversations,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Continue reading Meta Touts 35 Percent Q1 Profit Jump, ‘Personalized’ AI App

Instagram has released a standalone video editing tool called Edits that is being described as a full-fledged suite that also has camera capabilities. The resulting content can be released on any social platform, not just those from Meta Platforms, though an Instagram account is required to access Edits. Available worldwide for iOS and Android, Edits is positioned as a way for social videographers to level-up their Instagram or Facebook Reels, but also as a tool for professionals who want a simple mobile solution for short-form videos. Edits also offers analytics so creators can see how their work is performing. Continue reading Instagram ‘Edits’ Video App Is Released for iOS and Android

Meta Platforms has released its first Llama 4 models, a multimodal trio that ranges from the foundational Behemoth to tiny Scout, with Maverick in between. With 16 experts and only 17B active parameters (the number used per task), Llama Scout is “more powerful than all previous generation Llama models, while fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU,” according to Meta. Maverick, with 17B active parameters and 128 experts, is touted as beating GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash across various benchmarks, “while achieving comparable results to the new DeepSeek v3 on reasoning and coding with less than half the active parameters.” Continue reading Meta Unveils Multimodal Llama 4 Models, Previews Behemoth

Meta Platforms has reportedly begun “a small deployment” of its first in-house chip designed for AI training. The accelerator chip is engineered around the open-standard RISC-V architecture. TSMC produced the working samples now being tested. The goal is to create purpose-specific chips that are more efficient than Nvidia’s general purpose GPUs, enjoying the cost-savings that would come with wide use and reducing reliance on outside chip suppliers in a tight market. If the tests go well, Meta plans to scale up production for expanded use by 2026. Details of the new chip’s specifications remain unknown at this time. Continue reading Meta Tests New AI Accelerator Chip Designed with Broadcom

A standalone Meta AI app is in the works for Q2, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The move is aligned with Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stated intent to propel his company to the forefront of artificial intelligence by year’s end, vaulting ahead of competitors such as OpenAI, Alphabet, Anthropic and xAI. “This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg said in January during a Q4 earnings call with analysts. Continue reading Meta Plans Its Own Standalone AI App to Take On ChatGPT

Elon Musk’s xAI has released its latest AI model Grok 3, which the company is describing as the “smartest AI on Earth.” It includes reasoning capabilities and a new web analysis tool called DeepSearch that returns results “within seconds” and can refine specific sources, according to xAI. Grok 3 was trained with 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, resulting in improved response times and processing power. Future capabilities will include Voice Mode for conversational interaction and audio-to-text conversion. Access to Grok 3 is limited to X Premium+ subscribers or via a SuperGrok plan (that does not include X social features). Continue reading xAI Launches Grok 3 as Standalone and for X Premium+ Subs

Meta is rolling out personalization updates to its Meta AI personal assistant. At the end of last year, the company introduced a feature that lets Meta AI remember what you’ve shared with it in one-on-one chats on WhatsApp and Messenger so it could produce more relevant responses. That feature will now be available to Meta AI on Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp for iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada. “Meta AI will only remember certain things you tell it in 1:1 conversations (not group chats), and you can delete its memories at any time,” explains the company. Continue reading Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp Get Meta AI Memory Boost

Meta has added new features to Ray-Ban Metas in time for the holidays via a firmware update that make the smart glasses “the gift that keeps on giving,” per Meta marketing.  “Live AI” adds computer vision, letting Meta AI see and record what you see “and converse with you more naturally than ever before.” Along with Live AI, Live Translation is available for Meta Early Access members. Translation of Spanish, French or Italian will pipe through as English (or vice versa) in real time as audio in the glasses’ open-ear speakers. In addition, Shazam support is added for users interested in easily identifying songs. Continue reading Ray-Ban Meta Gets Live AI, RT Language Translation, Shazam

Meta Platforms revenue was up 19 percent to $40.6 billion in Q3 compared to the same period one year earlier. Profit rose to $15.7 billion — a 35 percent increase from 2023. The company believes that its years of investments in adtech, artificial intelligence and the metaverse are starting to pay off. In Q3, Meta reported $23.2 billion in expenses and capital expenditures of $9.2 billion. And the company isn’t taking its foot off the accelerator, having increased its annual spending forecast by $1 billion to a minimum of $38 billion. Additionally, Meta’s advertising revenue for Q3 was just a tick under its high-end spend projection of $40 billion. Continue reading Meta’s Investments in Adtech, AI, the Metaverse Yield Results

Marking its first news deal in years, Meta Platforms entered into an agreement with Reuters to use its content to answer user questions posed to its Meta AI chatbot. The arrangement comes as Meta has been minimizing news content on its services in response to publisher demands for revenue sharing and regulatory criticism over misinformation. Terms of the partnership were not disclosed, nor were details provided as to whether Meta plans to use Reuters content for model training. Meta AI is available across its Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger services. Continue reading Meta, Reuters Sign Multi-Year AI Content Licensing Agreement

Meta’s Llama 3.2 release includes two new multimodal LLMs, one with 11 billion parameters and one with 90 billion — considered small- and medium-sized — and two lightweight, text-only models (1B and 3B) that fit onto edge and mobile devices. Included are pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions. In addition to text, the multimodal models can interpret images, supporting apps that require visual understanding. Meta says the models are free and open source. Alongside them, the company is releasing “the first official Llama Stack distributions,” enabling “turnkey deployment” with integrated safety. Continue reading Meta Unveils New Open-Source Multimodal Model Llama 3.2

Meta has secured rights to the voices of actors Judi Dench, Kristen Bell, John Cena and others for its Meta AI chatbot, a ChatGPT-like digital assistant that is part of the plan for conversational AI as part of the multimodal Llama 3.2. Also revealed at Meta Connect this week was Orion, “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen,” queued up to become Meta’s “first consumer full holographic AR glasses,” though they won’t be available anytime soon. A low-priced Quest 3 mixed reality headset, the $299 Quest 3S, will be arriving in time for the holidays, however. Continue reading Meta Reveals Orion Concept Glasses, Celeb Voices, Quest 3S

Facebook parent Meta announced better-than-expected earnings for Q2 last week, surpassing Wall Street estimates for revenue and profit. The company plans to continue spending heavily on artificial intelligence and virtual reality, despite significant losses in its AR/VR and metaverse businesses. Meta reported a revenue increase of 22 percent from $32 billion for the same quarter last year, representing four straight quarters of growth exceeding 20 percent. The company noted that net income jumped 73 percent to $13.47 billion. Advertising revenue, largely from Facebook and Instagram, was up 22 percent year-over-year. Continue reading Meta Reports Q2 Digital Ad Growth, Will Continue AI Spending