At its upcoming Connect conference next month, Meta is rumored to unveil its first consumer-ready smart glasses with a built-in display, alongside a neural wristband controller. The $800 device, codenamed Hypernova, will be able to show simple visual content like texts and support AI assistant interactions. CNBC reports: Connect is a two-day conference for developers focused on virtual reality, AR and the metaverse. It was originally called Oculus Connect and obtained its current moniker after Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta in 2021. The glasses are internally codenamed Hypernova and will include a small digital display in the right lens of the device, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The device is expected to cost about $800 and will be sold in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the people said. CNBC reported in October that Meta was working with Luxottica on consumer glasses with a display. [...]

With Hypernova, Meta will finally be offering glasses with a display to consumers, but the company is setting low expectations for sales, some of the sources said. That's because the device requires more components than its voice-only predecessors, and will be slightly heavier and thicker, the people said. [...] Although Hypernova will feature a display, those visual features are expected to be limited, people familiar with the matter said. They said the color display will offer about a 20 degree field of view -- meaning it will appear in a small window in a fixed position -- and will be used primarily to relay simple bits of information, such as incoming text messages.

The Hypernova glasses will also come paired with a wristband that will use technology built by Meta's CTRL Labs, said people familiar with the matter. CTRL Labs, which Meta acquired in 2019, specializes in building neural technology that could allow users to control computing devices using gestures in their arms. [...] In addition to Hypernova and the wristband, Meta will also announce a third-generation of its voice-only smart glasses with Luxottica at Connect, one person said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Adweek: Meta wanted advertisers to believe its ecommerce ad product, Shops ads, was outperforming the competition, per a whistleblower complaint filed in a U.K. court. The former employee alleges the social media giant artificially inflated return on ad spend (ROAS) by counting shipping fees as revenue, subsidizing bids in ad auctions, and applying undisclosed discounts. The complaint, viewed by ADWEEK, was filed with the London Central Employment Tribunal on Wednesday (August 20) by Samujjal Purkayastha, a former product manager on Meta's Shops ads team. The document claims Meta artificially inflated performance metrics to push brands toward its fledgling ecommerce ad product.

The company's motivation, the complaint says, was in part to combat Apple's 2021 privacy changes that cut the troves of iOS tracking information that had long powered Meta's ad machine. Meta's former chief financial officer (CFO), David Wehner, said the changes would cost "on the order of $10 billion" in losses during the company's Q4 2021 earnings call. User purchases on Facebook or Instagram Shops pages would provide more first-party data, however. Purkayastha, who joined Meta (then Facebook) in 2020 as a product manager on the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Applied Research team, was reassigned to the Shops Ads team in March 2022 and remained at the company until Feb. 19, 2025, when he was terminated.

He alleged that during internal reviews in early 2024, Meta data scientists found the return on ad spend (ROAS) from Shops ads had been inflated between 17% and 19%. This discrepancy stemmed from Meta counting shipping fees and taxes as part of a sale, even though that money never went to merchants, he alleged. The company's other ad products exclude those figures, in line with competitors like Google, the complaint reads. Without including the fees and taxes, Shops ads performed no better than Meta's traditional ads, Purkayastha claimed. "This was significant," the complaint reads. "In addition to the ROAS performance metric being overstated by nearly a fifth, it meant that, rather than having exceeded our primary target, the Shops Ads team had in fact missed it once the figure was reduced to take account of the artificial inflation." Purkayastha raised these concerns with senior leadership in multiple meetings between 2022 and 2024, and is now seeking interim relief through his employment tribunal filing to have his former position reinstated.

A Meta spokesperson told ADWEEK the company is "actively defending these proceedings," adding that "allegations related to the integrity of our advertising practices are without merit and we have full confidence in our performance review processes."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta has paused hiring in its artificial intelligence division after bringing on more than 50 researchers and engineers. "All that's happening here is some basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises," a spokesperson for Meta said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

Over the last few months, Meta has been offering AI researchers salaries that dwarf those of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race. The company recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year), with potentially $100 million in the first year alone. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly also offered an unnamed AI engineer $1 billion in compensation to be paid out over several years.

AI-powered salespeople are outperforming their human counterparts on Chinese e-commerce platforms, working around the clock without fatigue to sell products ranging from printers to wet wipes. Shanghai marketing firm PLTFRM has deployed 30 virtual avatars across Taobao and Pinduoduo using Baidu video models and DeepSeek language models. Brother's AI avatar generated $2,500 in printer sales within two hours and increased livestream revenue 30 percent. The company now checks overnight AI sales data each morning as routine.

Livestreaming drives over one-third of China's e-commerce sales, with half the population shopping via broadcast in 2024. Baidu's June livestream featuring an AI version of influencer Luo Yonghao drew 13 million views and generated $7.7 million in sales. American and European companies have expressed interest, Wired reports, after PLTFRM successfully tested English-language avatars on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.

Google's AI Overviews has returned fraudulent customer service phone numbers in multiple reported incidents.

A Reddit user reported their friend received a fake number when searching "Swiggy [an Indian food delivery firm] customer care number," leading to attempted screen-sharing and money request scams. Facebook user Alex Rivlin encountered scammers after searching "royal caribbean customer service phone number 24 hours usa." The fraudulent representative requested credit card information before Rivlin detected the scam. Google said it is "aware" of the issue and has "taken action" against identified numbers. The company stated it is working to "improve results."

Meta announced today that it is splitting its Meta Superintelligence Labs into four divisions focused on AI research, superintelligence development, products, and infrastructure. The reorganization accompanies potential downsizing of the AI division's thousands of employees and executive departures, according to New York Times.

Vice President of Generative AI Loredana Crisan is expected to announce her departure Tuesday. The company is exploring third-party AI models for its products rather than relying solely on internal technology. Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang's team has abandoned Meta's previous frontier model Behemoth and is developing a new model from scratch, the report added.

Meta's internal policy document permitted the company's AI chatbots to engage children in "romantic or sensual" conversations and generate content arguing that "Black people are dumber than white people," according to a Reuters review of the 200-page "GenAI: Content Risk Standards" guide.

The document, approved by Meta's legal, public policy and engineering staff including its chief ethicist, allowed chatbots to describe children as attractive and create false medical information. Meta confirmed the document's authenticity but removed child-related provisions after Reuters inquiries, calling them "erroneous and inconsistent with our policies."

Legal scholar Victoria Haneman argues that U.S. law should grant estates a time-limited right to delete a deceased person's data so they can't be recreated by AI without their consent. "Digital resurrection by or through AI requires the personal data of the deceased, and the amount of data that we are storing online is increasing exponentially with each passing year," writes Haneman in an article published earlier this year in the Boston College Law Review. "It has been said that data is the new uranium, extraordinarily valuable and potentially dangerous. A right to delete will provide the decedent with a time-limited right for deletion of personal data." The Register reports: A living person may have some say on the matter through the control of personal digital documents and correspondence. But a dead person can't object, and US law doesn't offer the dead much data protection in terms of privacy law, property law, intellectual property law, or criminal law. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a law developed to help fiduciaries deal with digital files of the dead or incapacitated, can come into play. But Haneman points out that most people die intestate (without a will), leaving matters up to tech platforms. Facebook's response to dead users is to allow anyone to request the memorialization of an account, which keeps posts online. As for RUFADAA, it does little to address digital resurrection, says Haneman.

The right to publicity, which provides a private right of action against unauthorized commercial use of a person's name, image, or likeness, covers the dead in about 25 states, according to Haneman. But the monetization of publicity rights has proven to be problematic. Haneman says that there are some states where it's theoretically possible to be prosecuted for libeling or defaming the deceased, such as Idaho, Nevada, and Oklahoma, but adds that such prosecutions have declined because they tread upon the constitutional right to free expression. [...] A recent California law, the Delete Act, which took effect last year, is the first to offer a way for the living to demand the deletion of personal data from data brokers in one step. But according to Haneman, it's unclear whether the text of the law will be extended to cover the dead -- a possibility think tank Aspen Tech Policy Hub supports [PDF].

Haneman argues that a data deletion law for the dead would be grounded in laws governing human remains, where corpses receive protection against abuse despite being neither a person nor property. "The personal representative of the decedent has the right to destroy all physical letters and photographs saved by the decedent; merely storing personal information in the cloud should not grant societal archival rights," she argues. "A limited right of deletion within a twelve-month window balances the interests of society against the rights of the deceased."

"Benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis found that only five of the top 15 AI models are open source," reports the Washington Post, "and all were developed by Chinese AI companies...."

"Now some American executives, investors and academics are endorsing a plan to make U.S. open-source AI more competitive." A new campaign called the ATOM Project, for American Truly Open Models, aims to create a U.S.-based AI lab dedicated to creating software that developers can freely access and modify. Its blueprint calls for access to serious computing power, with upward of 10,000 of the cutting-edge GPU chips used to power corporate AI development. The initiative, which launched Monday, has gathered signatures of support from more than a dozen industry figures. They include veteran tech investor Bill Gurley; Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a repository for open-source AI models and datasets; Stanford professor and AI investor Chris Manning; chipmaker Nvidia's director of applied research, Oleksii Kuchaiev; Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer for OpenAI; and Dylan Patel, CEO and founder of research firm SemiAnalysis...

The lack of progress in open-source AI underscores the case for initiatives like ATOM: The U.S. has not produced a major new open-source AI release since Meta's launch of its Llama 4 model in April, which disappointed some AI experts... "A lot of it is a coordination problem," said ATOM's creator, Nathan Lambert, a senior research scientist at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI who is launching the project in a personal capacity... Lambert said the idea was to develop much more powerful open-source AI models than existing U.S. efforts such as Bloom, an AI language model from Hugging Face, Pythia from EleutherAI, and others. Those groups were willing to take on more legal risk in the name of scientific progress but suffered from underfunding, said Lambert, who has worked at Google's DeepMind AI lab, Facebook AI Research and Hugging Face.

The other problem? The hefty cost of top-performing AI. Lambert estimates that getting access to 10,000 state-of-the-art GPUs will cost at least $100 million. But the funding must be found if American efforts are to stay competitive, he said.
The initiative's web page is seeking signatures, but also asks visitors to the site to "consider how your expertise or resources might contribute to building the infrastructure America needs."

A San Francisco jury ruled that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act by collecting sensitive data from users of the Flo period-tracking app without consent. "The plaintiff's lawyers who sued Meta are calling this a 'landmark' victory -- the tech company contends that the jury got it all wrong," reports SFGATE. From the report: The case goes back to 2021, when eight women sued Flo and a group of other tech companies, including Google and Facebook, now known as Meta. The stakes were extremely personal. Flo asked users about their sex lives, mental health and diets, and guided them through menstruation and pregnancy. Then, the women alleged, Flo shared pieces of that data with other companies. The claims were largely based on a 2019 Wall Street Journal story and a 2021 Federal Trade Commission investigation. Google, Flo and the analytics company Flurry, which was also part of the lawsuit, reached settlements with the plaintiffs, as is common in class action lawsuits about tech privacy. But Meta stuck it out through the entire trial and lost.

The case against Meta focused on its Facebook software development kit, which Flo added to its app and which is generally used for analytics and advertising services. The women alleged that between June 2016 and February 2019, Flo sent Facebook, through that kit, various records of "Custom App Events" -- such as a user clicking a particular button in the "wanting to get pregnant" section of the app. Their complaint also pointed to Facebook's terms for its business tools, which said the company used so-called "event data" to personalize ads and content.

In a 2022 filing (PDF), the tech giant admitted that Flo used Facebook's kit during this period and that the app sent data connected to "App Events." But Meta denied receiving intimate information about users' health. Nonetheless, the jury ruled (PDF) against Meta. Along with the eavesdropping decision, the group determined that Flo's users had a reasonable expectation they weren't being overheard or recorded, as well as ruling that Meta didn't have consent to eavesdrop or record. The unanimous verdict was that the massive company violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The jury's ruling could impact over 3.7 million U.S. users who registered between November 2016 and February 2019, with updates to be shared via email and a case website. The exact compensation from the trial or potential settlements remains uncertain.

IBM's legendary Model M keyboard was sturdy and solid. But "What would happen if you took the classic layout and look of the Model M and rebuilt it with modern mechanical guts?" asks long-time Slashdot reader uninet. Writing for the long-running tech blog Open for Business , they review a new wireless keyboard from Vortex that was clearly inspired by the Model M: The result is a unique keyboard with one foot in two different decades... Let's call it the Vortex M for simplicity's sake.

I first became aware of it on a Facebook ad and was immediately fascinated. It looked so close to the original Model M, I wondered if someone else had gotten access to an original mold and was trying Unicomp's game. No, they've just managed to copy the aesthetic to a nearly uncanny level... The Vortex M eschews the normal eye candy we expect on modern keyboards and attempts the closest duplication of IBM's staid early PC design sensibility I can imagine. Off-white, rugged and absolutely no frills of lighting. If you're looking for cutesy, forget it.

The keyboard's casing has the same highly textured plastic that looks and feels instantly familiar to anyone who spent too many hours interacting with early PCs. Model M to a tee. The keycaps likewise look the part... The Vortex M looks like a Model M. Its build quality feels like a Model M. But one key press and it becomes clear this is a different beast. Underneath the Model M-styled skin, Vortex's keyboard is a very modern design — everything the Unicomp is not. For our test, Vortex provided a keyboard with Cherry MX Blues, the classic clicky option the company and I both thought would best match up against Model M's buckling springs...

Vortex's product configurator offers a variety of common and less common Cherry and Gateron options, if you want to get a different sort of feel in lieu of the clicky I tested. This is possible with an MX switch-style keyboard and impossible with buckling springs with their one option of bold clicky. Not only can this be done when ordering, but also later on, thanks to hot swap switches that allow changes without soldering. Following the modern premium board theme, Vortex paired high end switches with a gasket mount and foam padding. The combination provides a solid feeling, sound dampened typing experience. Ironically, though, for a keyboard that apes the design of perhaps the loudest keyboard on the market today, the Vortex M is (relatively) quiet even with the clicky Blues on tap...
The review's highlights:

• "The keyboard is exquisitely crafted to look like the IBM original... "

• "The Vortex M supports connecting to three different devices via Bluetooth, along with a 2.4 GHz receiver and a USB Type-C wired connection. "

• There's a full complement of media hot keys — "including an emoji key ala recent Macs. "

• "For repetitive tasks, the keyboard is programmable with macros... And unlike Unicomp's boards, Vortex's can switch between PC and Mac layouts with the press of a hotkey."

• The keyboard uses AA batteries rather than having a built-in rechargeable battery

The keyboard ultimately gave the reviewer some cognitive dissonance. "How am I typing on a Model M and not making a racket...?"

"Pricing varies based on options, but as tested, it clocked in at $154. That's the low end of the 'premium' market and this is an exceptional board for that price."

Australia's first domestically built rocket to attempt orbital launch crashed just 14 seconds after liftoff, though the company still declared the mission a success for igniting all engines and leaving the launch pad. The Associated Press reports: The rocket Eris, launched by Gilmour Space Technologies, was the first Australian-designed and manufactured orbital launch vehicle to lift off from the country and was designed to carry small satellites to orbit. It launched Wednesday morning local time in a test flight from a spaceport near the small town of Bowen in the north of Queensland state. In videos published by Australian news outlets, the 23-meter (75-foot) rocket appeared to clear the launch tower and hovered in the air before falling out of sight. Plumes of smoke were seen rising above the site. No injuries were reported. The company hailed the launch as a success in a statement posted to Facebook. A spokesperson said all four hybrid-propelled engines ignited and the maiden flight included 23 seconds of engine burn time and 14 seconds of flight. "Of course I would have liked more flight time but happy with this," wrote CEO Adam Gilmour on LinkedIn. Gilmour said in February that it was "almost unheard of" for a private rocket company to successfully launch to orbit on its first attempt.

"This is an important first step towards the giant leap of a future commercial space industry right here in our region," added Mayor Ry Collins of the local Whitsunday Regional Council.

Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that Meta's AI systems have begun improving themselves over the past few months, calling the development "slow for now, but undeniable" and declaring that superintelligence is now within reach. The Meta CEO staked out the company's vision in a blog post for what he termed "personal superintelligence" -- AI that helps individuals achieve their goals rather than replacing human work entirely.

Zuckerberg drew a sharp line between Meta's approach and that of other companies in the field, arguing that competitors want superintelligence "directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output." Meta's version would give people their own superintelligent assistants that know them deeply and help them create, experience adventures, and become better friends.

Zuckerberg envisions smart glasses as the primary computing device, understanding context through what users see and hear throughout their day. The next few years represent a critical juncture, Zuckerberg wrote, calling the rest of this decade "the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city's mayor. "It's a game changer. It's huge," Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday. With cool weather -- good for keeping computer temperatures down -- and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming's capital has become a hub of computing power. The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.

The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement. A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that's more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people. And it's a major exporter of energy. A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA. But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials. [...] While data centers are energy-hungry, experts say companies can help reduce their effect on the climate by powering them with renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Even so, electricity customers might see their bills increase as utilities plan for massive data projects on the grid. The data center would be built several miles (kilometers) south of Cheyenne off U.S. 85 near the Colorado state line. State and local regulators would need to sign off on the project, but Collins was optimistic construction could begin soon. "I believe their plans are to go sooner rather than later," Collins said.

In 1995's online world, AOL existed mostly beside the internet as a "walled, manicured garden," remembers Fast Company.

Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout calling himself "Da Chronic" who says he used "a computer that I couldn't even afford" using "a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic." [D]istributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL's windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, a chat impersonator, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer for sharing warez (and later mp3s), and even an "Artificial Intelligence Bot" [which performed automated if-then responses]. Crucially, AOHell could also help users gain "free" access to AOL. The program came with a program for generating fake credit card numbers (which could fool AOL's sign up process), and, by January 1995, a feature for stealing other users' passwords or credit cards. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets...

Of course, Da Chronic — actually a 17-year-old high school dropout from North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouche — had other reasons, too. Rekouche wanted to hack AOL because he loved being online with his friends, who were a refuge from a difficult life at home, and he couldn't afford the hourly fee. Plus, it was a thrill to cause havoc and break AOL's weak systems and use them exactly how they weren't meant to be, and he didn't want to keep that to himself. Other hackers "hated the fact that I was distributing this thing, putting it into the team chat room, and bringing in all these noobs and lamers and destroying the community," Rekouche told me recently by phone...

Rekouche also couldn't have imagined what else his program would mean: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time he left AOL in late 1995, his program had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenage script kiddies and hackers, and fueled a subculture where legions of young programmers and artists got their start breaking and making things, using pirated software that otherwise would have been out of reach... In 2014, [AOL CEO Steve] Case himself acknowledged on Reddit that "the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us," but that "some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things."

When he first met Mark Zuckerberg, he said, the Facebook founder confessed to Case that "he learned how to program by hacking [AOL]."
"I can't imagine somebody doing that on Facebook today," Da Chronic says in a new interview with Fast Company. "They'll kick you off if you create a Google extension that helps you in the slightest bit on Facebook, or an extension that keeps your privacy or does a little cool thing here and there. That's totally not allowed."

AOHell's creators had called their password-stealing techniques "phishing" — and the name stuck. (AOL was working with federal law enforcement to find him, according to a leaked internal email, but "I didn't even see that until years later.") Enrolled in college, he decided to write a technical academic paper about his program. "I do believe it caught the attention of Homeland Security, but I think they realized pretty quickly that I was not a threat."

He's got an interesting perspective today, noting with today's AI tool's it's theoretically possible to "craft dynamic phishing emails... when I see these AI coding tools I think, this might be like today's Visual Basic. They take out a lot of the grunt work."

What's the moral of the story? "I didn't have any qualifications or anything like that," Da Chronic says. "So you don't know who your adversary is going to be, who's going to understand psychology in some nuanced way, who's going to understand how to put some technological pieces together, using AI, and build some really wild shit."

Meta has appointed Shengjia Zhao as Chief Scientist of its new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao was a former OpenAI researcher known for his work on ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company's first AI reasoning model, o1. "I'm excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs," Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads Friday. "Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one. Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role." TechCrunch reports: Zhao will set a research agenda for MSL under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who was recently hired to lead the new unit. Wang, who does not have a research background, was viewed as a somewhat unconventional choice to lead an AI lab. The addition of Zhao, who is a reputable research leader known for developing frontier AI models, rounds out the leadership team. To further fill out the unit, Meta has hired several high-level researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple, and Anthropic, as well as pulling researchers from Meta's existing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab and generative AI unit.

Zuckerberg notes in his post that Zhao has pioneered several breakthroughs, including a "new scaling paradigm." The Meta CEO is likely referencing Zhao's work on OpenAI's reasoning model, o1, in which he is listed as a foundational contributor alongside OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Meta currently doesn't offer a competitor to o1, so AI reasoning models are a key area of focus for MSL. The Information reported in June that Zhao would be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside three other influential OpenAI researchers -- Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. Meta has also recruited Trapit Bansal, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI reasoning models with Zhao, as well as three employees from OpenAI's Zurich office who worked on multimodality.

The Independent notes a remarkable-if-true figure that's being bandied around this week.

Meta "started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told his brother Jack on his podcast. "You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year... I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that."

Previous reports have also suggested that Meta is targeting employees at Google DeepMind, offering similar levels of compensation. Some of these efforts appear to have been successful, with DeepMind researcher Jack Rae joining Meta's 'Superintelligence' team earlier this month...

During the podcast, which was published on Tuesday, Mr Altman also gave details about future AI products that OpenAI is hoping to build, claiming that they will enable "crazy new social experiences" and "virtual employees". The most important breakthrough over the next decade, he said, would involve radical new discoveries powered by AI. "The thing that I think will be the most impactful in that five-to-10 year timeframe is AI will actually discover new science," he said.
The Washington Post notes that Zuckerberg "responded to recent reports of his compensation offers in an interview posted by the Information on YouTube on Tuesday, saying that 'a lot of the numbers specifically have been inaccurate" but acknowledging there is "an absolute premium for the best and most talented people." Zuckerberg's recent hires and other comments this week suggest he's not taking any chances of being left behind. He announced plans for a giant data center campus large enough to obscure Manhattan to power future AI projects by his superintelligence team.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Mark Zuckerberg and current and former directors and officers of Meta Platforms agreed on Thursday to settle claims seeking $8 billion for the damage they allegedly caused the company by allowing repeated violations of Facebook users' privacy, a lawyer for the shareholders told a Delaware judge on Thursday. The parties did not disclose details of the settlement and defense lawyers did not address the judge, Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery. McCormick adjourned the trial just as it was to enter its second day and she congratulated the parties. The plaintiffs' lawyer, Sam Closic, said the agreement just came together quickly.

Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who is a defendant in the trial and a Meta director, was scheduled to testify on Thursday. Shareholders of Meta sued Zuckerberg, Andreessen and other former company officials including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in hopes of holding them liable for billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company paid in recent years. The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 after finding that it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users' data. The shareholders wanted the 11 defendants to use their personal wealth to reimburse the company. The defendants denied the allegations, which they called "extreme claims." "This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but it's a missed opportunity for public accountability," said Jason Kint, the head of Digital Content Next, a trade group for content providers.

"Facebook has successfully remade the 'Cambridge Analytica' scandal about a few bad actors rather than an unraveling of its entire business model of surveillance capitalism and the reciprocal, unbridled sharing of personal data. That reckoning is now left unresolved."

BrianFagioli writes: Meta has partnered with Amrize and the University of Illinois to develop an "AI-optimized" concrete mix that cuts carbon by 35% for its new data center.

The UK secretly relocated thousands of Afghans to the UK after their personal details were disclosed in one of the country's worst ever data breaches, putting them at risk of Taliban retaliation. The operation cost around $2.7 billion and remained under a court-imposed superinjunction until recently lifted. Reuters reports: The leak by the Ministry of Defence in early 2022, which led to data being published on Facebook the following year, and the secret relocation program, were subject to a so-called superinjunction preventing the media reporting what happened, which was lifted on Tuesday by a court. British defence minister John Healey apologised for the leak, which included details about members of parliament and senior military officers who supported applications to help Afghan soldiers who worked with the British military and their families relocate to the UK. "This serious data incident should never have happened," Healey told lawmakers in the House of Commons. It may have occurred three years ago under the previous government, but to all whose data was compromised I offer a sincere apology."

The incident ranks among the worst security breaches in modern British history because of the cost and risk posed to the lives of thousands of Afghans, some of whom fought alongside British forces until their chaotic withdrawal in 2021. Healey said about 4,500 Afghans and their family members have been relocated or were on their way to Britain under the previously secret scheme. But he added that no-one else from Afghanistan would be offered asylum because of the data leak, citing a government review which found little evidence of intent from the Taliban to seek retribution against former officials.