Mark Zuckerberg just explored acquiring top AI startups including Thinking Machines Lab, Perplexity, and Safe Superintelligence to overhaul Meta’s AI strategy. While talks fizzled over price and valuation, Meta is aggressively stacking talent under newly hired AI chief Alexandr Wang.
Meta just teamed up with Oakley to launch Oakley Meta HSTN, a rugged pair of performance AI glasses built for athletes. The frames pack a 3K camera, IPX4 water resistance, and Meta AI voice controls with up to 8 hours of battery life. Preorders open July 11 starting at $399.
OpenAI is officially winding down its work with Scale AI following Meta’s multi-billion-dollar investment and hire of its CEO Alexandr Wang. OpenAI says it is already shifting toward more specialized data partners, and Google is reportedly considering a similar breakup. Scale AI now faces a fight to prove its core labeling business can stay neutral.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta offered signing bonuses as high as $100 million to poach top researchers, though none of his best talent took the offer. Mark Zuckerberg is on an aggressive hiring spree to build a superintelligence team, but Altman argued that throwing massive upfront payouts to copy competitors never works.
Meta just revealed the inaugural cohort for its Llama Startup Program, selected from more than 1,000 applications. The early-stage startups span healthcare administrative agents, legal tech, and gaming, and will receive direct backing from Meta's Llama engineering team alongside cloud credit reimbursements to offset inference and training costs.
Meta just teased a new collaboration with Oakley, launching an Instagram page that points to a June 20 reveal. The upcoming AI smart glasses are reportedly built for athletes, using a lightweight frame based on Oakley's Sphaera style with a single camera to cut weight. Why it matters: Meta is pushing into fitness tracking before its full AR glasses arrive in a few years.
Groq just officially became a supported Inference Provider on the Hugging Face Hub. Developers can now run open-source models like Llama 4 directly through Groq's low-latency LPU chips using HF's web UI or Python and JS SDKs. You can bill through Hugging Face without added markups or plug in your own Groq API key.
Google is cutting ties with Scale AI, its primary data-labeling vendor, after Meta agreed to acquire a 49% stake in the startup. Google had planned to spend $200 million this year, but with rivals like Microsoft and xAI also backing away, top AI labs refuse to risk having proprietary model blueprints exposed to Meta.
Meta just poured major capital into Scale AI at a valuation topping $29 billion, expanding their data partnership and bringing Scale founder Alexandr Wang over to Meta to lead AI initiatives. Wang will keep a Scale board seat while former Uber Eats leader Jason Droege steps in as interim CEO. Why it matters: Meta locks down high-grade training data pipelines while snapping up one of the industry's most influential builders.
Meta just filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the company behind the CrushAI nudify app, for repeatedly bypassing ad review rules. The company also rolled out new detection tech targeting benign-looking bait ads and shared over 3,800 violating URLs across the tech industry via the Lantern network.
Meta just rolled out generative AI video editing across the Meta AI app, Meta.AI website, and Edits app. Users in the US and over a dozen countries can choose from over 50 preset prompts to transform 10 seconds of video into comic styles or video games for free. Meta says the tool was inspired by its Movie Gen research, with custom text prompts coming later this year.
Meta is reportedly setting up a brand-new AI research lab dedicated to pursuing superintelligence. As part of a broader shakeup, Mark Zuckerberg has tapped Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and is in talks to invest billions into his startup, while dangling seven- to nine-figure pay packages to poach researchers from OpenAI and Google.
Meta is replacing human evaluators with AI to automate up to 90% of its privacy and societal risk assessments, according to leaked internal documents. Product teams can now launch updates much faster through automated questionnaires, but current and former employees warn the move cuts corners on sensitive issues like youth safety and misinformation. Why it matters: Trading human guardrails for shipping speed could unleash unforeseen real-world harms.
Meta is testing a feature in its Quest v77 update that automatically turns regular 2D Instagram photos into 3D using AI view synthesis. The model reconstructs flat images pixel by pixel to add depth, meaning creators won't need expensive 3D cameras. The rollout begins this week for select testers.
Meta just launched the Llama Startup Program to help early-stage companies build generative AI products. Selected US startups can receive up to $6,000 a month in cloud API reimbursements for up to six months, alongside direct technical guidance from Meta's Llama team. Applications for the first cohort close on May 30, 2025.
Meta is reportedly hitting roadblocks with "Behemoth," its next flagship Llama model, pushing its launch from April to at least the fall. Engineers are struggling to deliver meaningful gains over earlier versions, sparking internal debate over whether it's ready. With 11 of 14 original Llama authors gone, pressure from Wall Street is mounting.
Meta just announced its Ray-Ban smart glasses will go on sale in India on May 19 starting at ₹29,990 (around $353). The multimodal Meta AI features live translation and hands-free assistance, though local Indian languages aren't supported yet. With 2 million units sold globally since 2023, Meta is testing whether its flagship hardware can win over one of the world's biggest tech markets.
Meta just appointed Robert Fergus as the new head of its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, succeeding the departing Joelle Pineau. Fergus originally co-founded FAIR with Yann LeCun in 2014 before spending the last five years as a research director at Google DeepMind. The move signals Meta's intent to reset FAIR as an exploratory research haven while its separate GenAI team drives commercial products.
Meta is reportedly developing a "super-sensing" live AI mode for two new smart glasses slated for next year. The software keeps cameras always on to recognize people by name and remind you about forgotten keys, though current testing reportedly drains the battery in just 30 minutes.
Ai2 just released Olmo 2 1B, a 1-billion-parameter open model that outperforms Google's Gemma 3 1B and Meta's Llama 3.2 1B on math reasoning and truthfulness benchmarks. It comes with complete code and training datasets under Apache 2.0, running easily on consumer laptops and mobile devices.
