Meta

The company formerly known as Facebook has had some trouble making its namesake metaverse become a thing. And rumors are that division of the company is facing massive budget cuts. But things aren’t going so smoothly elsewhere, either. Now word is that the company’s next-gen Phoenix mixed reality glasses are being delayed until 2027, according to Business Insider.

Reuters reports that Meta just bought Limitless, an AI pendant that listens to and summarizes your conversations. It’s a burgeoning category of wearables (see: Bee AI which was bought by Amazon) and hints that like Google, Meta’s interested in perhaps building its own ecosystem of AI-powered gadgets.

Initially, developers can only use the Wearable Device Access Toolkit to make apps for the Ray-Ban Meta and the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses, but Meta’s Tyler Yee says the toolkit will be available for the Meta Ray-Ban Display and Oakley Meta Vanguard “soon.”

Threads will test a feature where you can include “dear algo” in a post to add more or less content on whatever you’re writing to the algorithm about to your feed, according to Threads boss Connor Hayes.

Meta is booting rival AI companies out of WhatsApp to reduce the competition for its own Meta AI assistant, a classic sign of confidence.

Members can now post under a nickname, along with a custom avatar, though admins have to approve them first. It’s a small step towards Discordification for Facebook, which has otherwise always insisted on posting under real names.

The company plants to start trading power, a move that could support the buildout of new power plants as grids try to keep up with rising electricity demand from data centers and generative AI, Bloomberg reports.

Lecun’s widely-rumored departure is official just weeks after significant layoffs affected Meta’s legacy Fundamental AI Research unit (FAIR) that he created. Lecun — the “odd man out” at Meta for believing LLMs are a “dead end” — called creating FAIR “my proudest non-technical accomplishment,” and says he will create a startup to continue his Advanced Machine Intelligence research, with Meta as a partner.

It’s a thing now. The game is available for Meta Quest 2, Quest 3, Quest 3S, and Quest Pro right now. It’s a standalone game, so if you already own the flatscreen version and want to play in VR, you’ll need to buy this special version, according to an FAQ.

The Financial Times says LeCun is planning to launch his own start-up and is in early talks to raise funding for it. He’s reportedly planning to leave in the coming months. Meta recently cut approximately 600 jobs from LeCun’s Fundamental AI Research unit as the company shifts its focus to the Superintelligence Labs group, led by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. Wang was the CEO of Scale AI, which Meta acquired for $14.3 billion.

So are external comment buttons, according to Meta. They’ll be discontinued on February 10th, 2026, and starting on that date, they’ll render instead as a 0 x 0 pixel to prevent causing errors.

Internal documents seen by Reuters show that the social media giant expected to make 10 percent of its overall revenue from running ads for illegal online casinos, fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, and banned medical products last year. Platform users are shown an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads every day.

So says France’s equality watchdog, ruling Meta needs to improve its job listings, where mechanic roles are mostly being shown to men, with preschool teacher ads going to women. We’ve been talking about sexism in job algorithms for a decade now, including at Facebook, but apparently some things never change.

As Meta published its quarterly earnings yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg promised that AI would soon bring to social media the one thing we’ve all been waiting for: a “huge corpus of content.”