Meta

The guy who renamed Facebook to Meta went long with a blog post this morning about a grandiose AGI-ish vision for artificial intelligence and why his company is so invested in it. It also might help explain why Meta is making huge offers to hire “post-money” AI experts who aren’t completely convinced Meta is the place to be.

The company plans on holding mock interviews where it will give coding candidates access to an AI assistant, according to a report from 404 Media.

The company is making the change starting in October “in response to the EU’s incoming Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation, which introduces significant operational challenges and legal uncertainties,” according to a blog post.

Meta’s hinted at this kind of wristband before, but The New York Times just published a deeper dive based on a research paper published in Nature. The neat thing is it can “predict” what you’re going to do based on electrical signals sent from your brain through your muscles. This isn’t a new concept. Third-party straps like the Mudra Band do similar things. But according to my colleague Alex Heath, this particular band will launch at Connect with Meta’s Hypernova glasses.

Adult-managed accounts that primarily post pictures of children will no longer be recommended to adult users “who have shown potentially suspicious behavior,” according to Meta, and vice versa — making them harder to find in Search. This was announced today alongside new features for teen accounts that make it easier to report and block unwanted contact in DMs.

The changes include tools to compare post performance over time and see where people encounter your posts. You can read more about the changes in a blog post or on Threads.

Reportedly in testing since June, I’ve now been served three of these unskippable “Ad break” ads over the last two days. It’s jarring, and has accelerated my desire to quit the platform that’s increasingly less fun and flooded with AI slop.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

The company doesn’t have any posts on the platform yet, but you can follow its profile now.

YouTube is a hit on TVs, and Meta and TikTok are looking to get in on that battleground, The Information reports. What will launch first: Instagram for TV or Instagram for iPad?

Kyle Chayka, who wrote for this website about the “airspace” aesthetic created by social media, is now looking into how LLM models affect creativity. He suggests that if Silicon Valley once homogenized decor — and, to some degree, created beige influencers — it may now be making LLM users less original, too.

The recently-launched CapCut clone is also adding more text effects and will let you apply voice enhancement to voiceovers. Check out all of the new updates in a post from Instagram’s Creators account.