Meta appears to be testing the option to sign up for its X rival with a Facebook account, as it slowly separates Threads from its Instagram origins, with a support page but no official announcement yet. It opens up a new audience for the app, which is closing in on X’s daily active user numbers.
[help.instagram.com]
Researchers Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung are said to be joining Meta’s superintelligence lab, the latest of several high-profile OpenAI researchers and developers to be plucked by the social media giant. That would make this the second big move in as many years for Wei and Won Chung, who left Google’s Brain research group to join OpenAI in 2023.
“We’re calling the first one Prometheus and it’s coming online in ‘26,” Zuckerberg says. “We’re also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”
He also pointed to a SemiAnalysis report that goes into detail about Meta’s AI “Superintelligence” strategy, including where the company has made some missteps and how it’s moving forward.
Zuckerberg is picking off top talent from across the industry, and OpenAI might be more vulnerable than most.
According to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch, the Threads mobile app reached 115.1 million daily active users in June, compared to the 132 million daily actives for X and 4.1 million for Bluesky. But while X’s growth declined by 15.2 percent year-over-year on mobile, Threads has increased by 127.8 percent during the same period.
X only has to take Meta seriously on iOS and Android, however, given it’s still thrashing both Threads and Bluesky for web visits.
Bloomberg reports that Mark Zuckerberg’s latest high-priced AI hire is Apple’s foundation AI model leader, Ruoming Pang, based on an offer worth “tens of millions of dollars per year,” plus Yuanzhi Li from OpenAI and Anton Bakhtin from Anthropic.
Last week, former Apple AI lead Daniel Gross confirmed his departure from the startup Safe Superintelligence Inc., reportedly also to join Meta’s team. Bloomberg’s sources said Pang’s departure “...could be the start of a string of exits.”
[bloomberg.com]
The company doesn’t have any posts on the platform yet, but you can follow its profile now.
[threads.com]
