Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, counts more than 3 billion monthly users across its family of apps. Now, it’s trying to build the next generation of services in virtual reality and the metaverse through Meta Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds — all while dealing with antitrust pressures, privacy concerns, and younger users shifting to other platforms.
The Information reports that the job cuts will affect “a few hundred” employees across the company, including in its Reality Labs division, which experienced a round of layoffs in January as Meta pulls back on the metaverse. The layoffs also reportedly impact workers on its social media, recruiting, and sales teams.
[The Information]
Alongside supply constraints and AI regulations, requirements for devices in the European Union to have removable batteries by 2027 are holding back plans to launch Ray-Ban Display smart glasses in the region. Meta is reportedly discussing possible workarounds with the EU.
If there’s one job people might actually be happy to see eliminated by AI, it’s the CEO. Especially if that CEO is Mark Zuckerberg (74 percent disapproval rate as of June 2025). Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, he might be training his AI agent replacement as we speak:
Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta Platforms, is building a CEO agent to help him do his job, according to a person familiar with the project. The agent, which is still in development, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster—for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get, the person familiar with the project said.
And the headline of the essay in which this happens asks if he should be burned at the stake. Father Paolo Benanti, the Papal AI advisor, doesn’t seem too pleased about Thiel’s Antichrist lectures, which Thiel has brazenly brought to Rome. “La Silicon Valley s’était lancée dans un coup d’État permanent.” I don’t think you need to know French to get the gist of that. one, but linked below is a summary of the essay. Make auto-da-fe great again??
[Universal Life Church Monastery]
Last year, content moderators who’ve risked consequences like PTSD working for Big Tech companies have started to organize for better treatment in the last several years. Now, Meta has announced a wide rollout of its AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, and that it will “reduce our reliance on third-party vendors” employing humans for content enforcement.
While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drugs sales or scams.
In a post on the website for his encrypted AI chatbot, Confer, Moxie Marlinspike says he’s working to “integrate Confer’s privacy technology so that it underpins Meta AI.”
[Confer Blog]
Khan’s FTC tried to expand the scope of antitrust law. Meta’s floundering VR ambitions shows why that mattered.
The Tardis-blue Meta Lab NYC store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan is no longer a pop-up shop. Meta announced on Wednesday that the skateboarding-themed glasses store is now a “permanent flagship location,” where it will continue selling its AI smart glasses and Meta Quest headsets.
Meta announced last month it would be shifting its strategy to go “all-in on mobile” for Horizon Worlds, and today, the company shared exactly when the VR version of the app would be going away.
Update: Linked to Meta’s website about the changes.
Just days after Meta acquired the “social” network for AI agents, the platform has updated its terms of service, stating that users must be 13 years of age or older to use the site and are “solely responsible” for actions taken by their AI agents, whether they “act autonomously or otherwise, and irrespective of whether such actions or omissions were intended.”
The company postponed its next AI model, codenamed Avocado, from this month until at least May, the NYT reports. Performance apparently falls short of rivals like Google.
Meta’s spent billions trying to catch up, and Avocado will be its first major release since hiring Scale’s Alexandr Wang to revamp its efforts.
Parent advocates were determined to make their presence known to Meta’s CEO.
The newly-launched Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) 300 chip is designed to train ranking and recommendations systems across Instagram and Facebook. And while the upcoming MTIA 400, 450, and 500 will be “capable of handling all workloads,” Meta says it will mainly use them for generative AI inference “in the near future and into 2027.”
[Meta Newsroom]
Mark Zuckerberg famously built Facebook, and the rest of Meta, on a “move fast and break things” philosophy, but one commenter has suggested that Grammarly’s new sloppelgangers could suggest a new approach for the industry.
tsmuse:
move fast and loot everything
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The move is an effort to appease antitrust regulators from the European Commission, Reuters reports. Previously, competitors’ chatbots were being blocked on WhatsApp, but now Meta says that “for a fee” it will “support general purpose AI chatbots using the WhatsApp Business API in Europe” for the next 12 months.
At around 5:30PM ET, Downdetector showed a recent peak of more than 11,000 user reports of problems, but reports of issues have fallen dramatically. At 5:48PM ET, NetBlocks said the platform was experiencing “international outages.” A Meta status page was showing “high disruptions” for Facebook Ads Manager, including ads creation and delivery, but that has been “resolved.”
It’s being rolled out to testers in the US to rival similar offerings found in ChatGPT and Gemini, according to Bloomberg.
If you don’t already own the game, which is still arguably one of the best VR games ever, you’ll be able to play it as part of the $7.99 per month subscription starting this month, Meta says.
Anyone else notice that ICE isn’t worried about getting doxed by Meta?
As part of a test on Threads, when you type “DM me” or “message me” in a post or reply, those words will turn into a link that people can tap to start a DM conversation.
After launching on Amazon Fire TV in December, Instagram for TV is expanding to Google TV devices in the US starting Tuesday, as Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced in a post on Threads. The feature lets users view reels on their TV, arranged into “channels” for different topics and themes.
[Threads]
