Meta announced Tuesday that it is extending its restriction on political ads until later in the week, though it did not specify which day the ban would be lifted. When asked for more information, a Meta spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to the announcement about the company working to “protect the integrity of elections on Facebook and […]
Meta extends political ad ban past Election Day Read More »
Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have placed big bets on nuclear power to secure electricity for their data centers as AI and cloud computing have sent power use surging. But as Amazon and Meta discovered last week, those bets are far from a sure thing. A series of recent rulings from regulators dashed their hopes of
Regulators deliver successive blows to Amazon and Meta’s nuclear power ambitions Read More »
To combat the perception that its “open” AI is aiding foreign adversaries, Meta today said that it’s making its Llama series of AI models available to U.S. government agencies and contractors in national security. “We are pleased to confirm that we’re making Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense
Meta says it’s making its Llama models available for US national security applications Read More »
Meta’s social network, Threads, now has 275 million monthly active users (MAUs), the company said on Sunday. “Yesterday we crossed 275M monthly active users on @Threads. A big thank you to everyone who’s helped us get this far. There’s a lot more to do, and plenty of things to fix, but there’s something exciting about
Threads now has 275M monthly active users Read More »
Chinese research scientists linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military wing of China’s ruling party, reportedly used “open” AI from Meta to develop a tool for defense applications. According to Reuters, Chinese researchers, including two affiliated with a PLA R&D group, used Meta’s Llama 2 AI model to create a military-focused chatbot. The
Chinese military researchers reportedly used Meta AI to develop defense chatbot Read More »
Instagram on Friday announced an update to DMs, its direct messages inbox, which will improve the experience for those who receive a lot of inbound messages, like creators and influencers. Now, the app is introducing tools that will allow users to sort and filter their “message requests” — meaning those messages that don’t arrive in
Instagram upgrades DMs with focus on creators Read More »
Meta says it’s partnering with sensor firm GelSight and Wonik Robotics, a South Korean robotics company, to commercialize tactile sensors for AI. GelSight will work with Meta to bring to market Digit 360, which Meta describes as a “a tactile fingertip with human-level multimodal sensing capabilities.” The successor to Meta’s Digit sensor, Digit 360 digitizes
Meta is making a robot hand that can ‘feel’ touch Read More »
After rolling out the trending topics feature in the U.S. earlier this year, Threads is now testing out the feature in Japan. “Lots of folks outside the US have been asking for the “Trending Now” feature, and we’re working on bringing it to more countries. This week, we’ll begin testing the feature in Japan with
Threads is testing the ‘trending now’ view in Japan Read More »
Meta has released an “open” implementation of the viral generate-a-podcast feature in Google’s NotebookLM. Called NotebookLlama, the project uses Meta’s own Llama models for much of the processing, unsurprisingly. Like NotebookLM, it can generate back-and-forth, podcast-style digests of text files uploaded to it. NotebookLlama first creates a transcript from a file — e.g. a PDF
Meta releases an ‘open’ version of Google’s podcast generator Read More »
Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The agents are coming — the AI agents, that is. This week, Anthropic released its newest AI model, an upgraded version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that can interact with the web and desktop apps by clicking
This Week in AI: The AI agents cometh Read More »
