Meta is paying $14.3 billion to acquire 49 percent of Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to revamp its troubled AI efforts. As part of the deal, Wang will report directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and remain on Scale’s board of directors, both companies announced on Thursday. Sources say Wang will lead…
It sounds like the start of a 21st-century horror film: Your browser history has been public all along, and you had no idea. That’s basically what it feels like right now on the new stand-alone Meta AI app, where swathes of people are publishing their ostensibly private conversations with the chatbot. When you ask the…
For five weeks, the Federal Trade Commission asked a federal judge to imagine a world where Instagram and WhatsApp flourished outside Meta’s control instead of being acquired by the tech giant. In the sixth and final week of trial, Meta asked Judge James Boasberg to consider that actually, these apps might be as good as…
Meta’s building a new AI data center so massive in Louisiana that the local utility company has plans to construct three new gas-fired power plants to provide it with enough electricity. Now, advocates and lawmakers are pressing Meta for answers about how it’ll clean up pollution stemming from the data center’s energy consumption. Sen. Sheldon…
If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount…
The government should be scrutinizing Meta’s power. Unfortunately, its legal attack isn’t cutting to the heart of what keeps Meta big. This week, I spent three days in a Washington, DC courtroom watching Mark Zuckerberg testify. He was there defending his company from being broken up by the Federal Trade Commission, which is seeking to…
“Your honor, the FTC calls Mark Zuckerberg.” Flanked by two bodyguards, Meta’s CEO solemnly strode into a Washington, DC courtroom. Despite his last-ditch efforts to avoid a trial, he was there, jaw clenched, to defend his company from being broken up by the US government. Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Trade Commission’s…
A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on e-books without permission. The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a…
Over the weekend, Meta dropped two new Llama 4 models: a smaller model named Scout, and Maverick, a mid-size model that the company claims can beat GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks.” Maverick quickly secured the number-two spot on LMArena, the AI benchmark site where humans compare outputs…
Meta has released a new collection of AI models, Llama 4, in its Llama family — on a Saturday, no less. There are four new models in total: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. All were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad…