Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has reported a 19% increase in revenue to $40.6bn for the third quarter of 2024, driven in part by what founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “good progress with AI [artificial intelligence]”. “We had a good quarter driven by AI progress across our apps and business,”…
Meta no longer prolonging the life of datacentre servers Read More »
Meta is putting a lot of effort into its AI products as it focuses on the next phase of computing, one in which smart AR glasses might replace your iPhone or Android phone. This won’t happen anytime soon, and AR glasses might initially accompany the iPhone and Android phones. The Orion demo shows Meta’s very…
Meta might train AI with photos from your Ray-Ban smart glasses without telling you Read More »
When Western Digital introduced its Ultrastar DC SN861 SSDs earlier this year, the company did not disclose which controller it used for these drives, which made many observers presume that WD was using an in-house controller. But a recent teardown of the drive shows that is not the case; instead, the company is using a…
Workforce reductions are mounting across the tech sector globally as firms attempt to free up more resources for their artificial intelligence (AI) deployments. According to tracking website Layoffs.fyi, tech companies laid off more than 165,000 people in 2022 and 264,000 people in 2023, with the latest data showing that 410 tech firms have laid off…
Tech sector layoffs mount amid AI investment frenzy Read More »
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has begun looking at whether it should investigate Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002. The CMA is already looking at Anthropic’s partnership with Google owner Alphabet, as well as Microsoft’s partnership with Inflection. In October 2023, Alphabet invested $2bn in OpenAI rival…
UK competition regulator looks into Amazon’s Anthropic funding Read More »
One reason I’ve been underwhelmed by AI is that companies consistently frame it as a solution to every problem under the sun. That’s why Meta’s new Segment Anything Model (SAM 2) is so intriguing to me. SAM 2 doesn’t answer questions, write code, generate AI images, or compose music. Instead, as its name suggests, the…
Meta’s new AI model can track any object in a picture or video Read More »
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has reported second-quarter revenue of $39.1bn, a 22% increase on its first quarter. The company reported that the cost of revenue had increased by 23%, driven primarily by higher infrastructure costs and costs associated with inventory in its augmented headsets division, Reality Labs. In his prepared…
Meta’s Zuckerberg looks ahead to AI-generated adverts Read More »
Your Instagram app is about to get another healthy (or unhealthy, depending on how you look at it) dose of generative AI. Meta wants to let anyone create AI avatars that have the ability to chat with users. If the concept sounds familiar, it’s because we’re looking at Meta’s version of OpenAI’s custom GPTs. Also,…
Instagram users, get ready for an onslaught of AI avatars Read More »
The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), working with social media platforms Meta, TikTok, X and YouTube, has removed almost 12,000 posts, pages and accounts that were used to advertise the services of people smugglers. The takedowns form part of a coordinated social media action plan, first set up in December 2021, targeting the services of criminals…
NCA seizes thousands of social media accounts used by people smugglers Read More »
Following the arrival of OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini model and Meta’s Llama 3.1 models, Google has debuted its own AI update. On Thursday, Google made the Gemini 1.5 Flash model available to free users. The updated model is a fairly comprehensive upgrade over version 1.0, with faster, smarter responses and the ability to hold longer conversations.According…
Google gives Gemini faster, higher-quality responses with 1.5 Flash Read More »
