Meta just rolled out new Meta AI-powered creative tools on Facebook, turning static profile photos into looping animations like waving or tossing confetti. The update also brings prompt-based image restyling to Stories and adds animated backdrops like falling leaves to text posts. Why it matters: Meta is making generative AI a casual, built-in social toy instead of a standalone utility.
Google just revealed that Gemini has surpassed 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million reported last quarter. While it is rapidly closing the gap with ChatGPT's estimated 810 million users, it still trails Meta AI's 1 billion mark. Pichai credited Gemini 3 as a key growth driver, noting API usage now tops 10 billion tokens per minute.
Meta plans to ship new AI models and products in the coming months, with Mark Zuckerberg highlighting "agentic shopping tools" that leverage personal data to buy goods. To fund its superintelligence push, the company is hiking its 2026 capital expenditure to as much as $135B, nearly double last year.
Meta just open-sourced ShapeR, a conditional 3D generation framework that reconstructs casual video captures into individual, metrically accurate 3D meshes. By combining SLAM points with rectified flow transformers, it avoids baking an entire scene into a single uneditable blob. Why it matters: Creators and roboticists can now pull individual, real-scale 3D assets straight from phone-recorded video.
Browser Use just launched the beta of BU, a web agent platform aimed squarely at replacing Meta's newly acquired $2B startup, Manus. BU pairs browser automation with full local computer access, cutting task times to 33.4 seconds and costs down to 1.9 cents per run. It is an aggressive push to prove open-source roots can beat expensive proprietary wrappers.
Meta is reportedly acquiring Singapore-based AI startup Manus for around $2B, marking one of the first major acquisitions of a generative AI company with substantial revenue. Manus rocketed to over $100M in ARR in just eight months with agents that handle white-collar tasks end-to-end. Meta plans to keep Manus independent while integrating its agents across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
A new study from Kapwing found that over 20% of the videos YouTube recommends to new accounts are low-quality "AI slop." Researchers created a fresh profile and discovered that 104 of the first 500 suggestions were automated junk, estimating these copycat channels generate around $117 million annually. While platforms scramble to moderate, low-effort synthetic media is already dominating feed recommendations at scale.
AI pioneer Yann LeCun just confirmed his new startup, AMI Labs, aiming to tackle LLM hallucinations by building 'world models' that simulate cause-and-effect. Former Nabla chief Alex LeBrun is stepping in as CEO with LeCun as executive chairman. The lab is reportedly already hunting for €500M at a €3B valuation before even launching, showing massive venture appetite for post-LLM architectures.
Meta just rolled out its v21 software update for Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, led by a new Conversation Focus tool that amplifies who you are talking to in crowded spots. It also teamed up with Spotify so you can look at scenery and say "play a song to match this view." Why it matters: Smart glasses are shifting from novelty tech into useful daily hearing and ambient assistance.
Meta just unveiled SAM Audio, bringing its "segment anything" vision to sound. The multimodal model lets users isolate specific sounds from messy audio mixtures using text prompts, visual clicks on video objects (like a guitar in a band), or time ranges. It's powered by a diffusion transformer architecture and available to test immediately in the Segment Anything Playground.
Meta just acquired Limitless, the startup behind the AI memory necklace Pendant and the controversial Mac recording app Rewind. Following the deal, Rewind will shut down screen and audio captures on December 19, while Pendant hardware sales stop immediately. Existing users get free support for a year, though several international regions are cut off right away.
Meta just updated Meta AI to pull in real-time news from a wide range of partners, including CNN, Fox News, News Corp, and Le Monde. When asked about breaking events, the assistant now surfaces diverse viewpoints with direct links back to original articles. Why it matters: Real-time info has always been a weak spot for LLMs, and Meta is trying to balance accuracy while giving publishers outbound traffic.
Meta just introduced WorldGen, a research system that builds fully navigable, interactive 3D environments from a single text prompt in minutes. Unlike existing tools that break down when you walk a few meters away, it generates 50x50-meter textured spaces compatible with Unity and Unreal. It remains a research preview for now.
Meta just dropped SAM 3D, a new model family that reconstructs detailed 3D objects, scenes, and human bodies straight from flat 2D images. Split into Objects and Body models, Meta is open-sourcing the checkpoints and inference code while launching a web Playground. It bridges a notorious data gap in 3D modeling and is already powering virtual staging on Facebook Marketplace.
Meta just expanded its computer vision lineup with SAM 3 and SAM 3D. SAM 3 lets you track and segment objects in images and video using natural text prompts, while SAM 3D reconstructs 2D photos into workable 3D objects and human avatars. Both models are available to test in a new interactive playground, with SAM 3 code and weights fully open-sourced.
Fei-Fei Li, Yann LeCun, and DeepMind are all heavily betting on "world models," but they basically mean three completely different architectures. World Labs' Marble delivers interactive 3D Gaussian splats, LeCun's JEPA builds an internal predictive latent brain, and DeepMind's Genie 3 and SIMA 2 generate real-time video simulators. Why it matters: The industry is packaging front-end assets, robot gymnasiums, and core machine cognition under a single marketing buzzword.
Meta just released Omnilingual ASR, an open-source speech recognition model supporting over 1,600 languages—dwarfing Whisper's 99. With zero-shot in-context learning, developers can extend coverage to 5,400+ languages with just a few audio-text pairs. Best of all, Meta ditched its restrictive Llama license for a true Apache 2.0 release, clearing the way for unrestricted commercial use.
Meta just brought its revamped Meta AI app to Europe, rolling out Vibes—a TikTok-like feed dedicated to AI-generated short videos. Users can generate clips from prompts, remix other creators' posts, add music, and push videos directly to Reels or Stories, while also managing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in the same hub.
Sandbar just introduced the Stream Ring, a $249 minimalist wearable built by two former Meta employees for instant voice notes and AI conversations. It skips health tracking entirely—you simply hold a touchpad to record thoughts, get auto-transcriptions, or talk to a bot that can even mimic your own voice. Why it matters: Turning smart rings into discreet voice inputs is a clever pivot from fitness trackers, though it remains iOS-only and won't ship until next summer.
OpenAI researchers just walked back claims that GPT-5 solved 10 decades-old Erdős math problems after experts pointed out the model merely surfaced existing papers that a database author had missed. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called the sloppy communication "embarrassing," exposing the awkward gap between AI research hype and actual scientific progress.
