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Meta lost a child safety trial in New Mexico after a court found that its platforms failed to adequately protect children from exploitation and misled parents about app safety. According to Ars Technica, the jury on Tuesday "deliberated for only one day before agreeing that Meta should pay $375 million in civil damages..." While the jury declined to impose the maximum penalty New Mexico sought, which could have cost the company $2.2 billion, Meta may still face additional financial penalties and could be forced to make changes to its apps. From the report: The trial followed a 2023 lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez after The Guardian published a two-year investigation exposing child sex trafficking markets on Facebook and Instagram. Torrez's office then conducted an undercover investigation codenamed "Operation MetaPhile," in which officers posed as children on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The jury heard that these fake profiles were "simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations" from child abusers, Torrez told CNBC in 2024. Ultimately, three men were arrested amid the sting for attempting to use Meta's social networks to prey on children. At trial, Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified that "harms to children, such as sexual exploitation and detriments to mental health, were inevitable on the company's platforms due to their vast user bases," The Guardian reported. Internal messages and documents, as well as testimony from child safety experts within and outside the company, showed that Meta repeatedly ignored warnings and failed to fix platforms to protect kids, New Mexico's AG successfully argued. Perhaps most troubling to the jury, law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also testified that Meta's reporting of crimes to children on its apps -- including child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) -- was "deficient," The Guardian reported. Rather than make it easy to trace harms on its platforms, the jury learned from frustrated cops that Meta "generated high volumes of 'junk' reports by overly relying on AI to moderate its platforms." This made its reporting "useless" and "meant crimes could not be investigated," The Guardian reported. Celebrating the win as a "historic victory," Torrez told CNBC that families had previously paid the price for "Meta's choice to put profits over kids' safety." "Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew," Torrez said. "Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough." Meta said the company plans to appeal the verdict. "We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal," Meta's spokesperson said. "We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone inside and outside his company to eventually have his or her own personal artificial-intelligence agent. He is starting with himself. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta Platforms, is building a CEO agent to help him do his job (source paywalled; alternative source), according to a person familiar with the project. The agent, which is still in development, is currently helping Zuckerberg get information faster -- for instance, by retrieving answers for him that he would typically have to go through layers of people to get, the person familiar with the project said. [...] Use of AI tools has spread quickly through the ranks at Meta -- in part because it is now a factor in employees' performance reviews. Meta's internal message board is filled with posts from employees sharing new AI use cases they have found and new tools they have built using AI, according to people familiar with the matter. [...] Employees have started using personal agent tools such as My Claw that have access to their chat logs and work files and can go talk to colleagues -- or their colleagues' own personal agents -- on their behalf, the people said. Another AI tool called Second Brain that is somewhere between a chatbot and an agent is also gaining momentum internally, according to people familiar with the matter. Second Brain was built by a Meta employee on top of Claude and can index and query documents for projects, among other uses. On the internal post announcing it to staff, the employee said it is "meant to be like an AI chief of staff." There is even a group on the internal messaging board where employees' personal agents talk to each other, some of the people said. (Separately, Meta acquired Moltbook, the social-media site for AI agents, and hired its founders in a deal earlier this month.) Meta also recently acquired Manus, a Singapore-based startup that makes personal agents that can execute tasks for its users, and is using the tool internally, some of the people said. Meta recently established a new applied AI engineering organization that is tasked with using AI to help speed up development of the company's large language models. Those teams will have an ultraflat structure of as many as 50 individual contributors reporting to one manager, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. [...] Employees across the company said they have been encouraged to attend AI tutorial meetings several times a week and frequent AI hackathons, and to create their own AI tools to speed up their work.

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Meta is partially reversing its decision to drop VR support for Horizon Worlds, keeping VR access for existing Unity-based games while shifting future development to a new flatscreen-focused Horizon Engine. UploadVR reports: If you somehow missed it, on Tuesday Meta officially announced that its Horizon Worlds "metaverse" platform would drop VR support in June, meaning it would only be available as a flatscreen experience for the web and smartphones. But now, in an "ask me anything" session on his Instagram page, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says the company has decided to "keep Horizon Worlds working in VR for existing games to support the fans who've reached out." Bosworth says this specifically applies to worlds developed with the Horizon Unity runtime, suggesting it applies to those built inside VR or with the Horizon Desktop Editor, but not those built for the new Horizon Engine with Horizon Studio. The picture painted here is of a clean technical break, with the legacy Unity version of Horizon Worlds continuing to support VR, and the new Horizon Engine focusing fully on flatscreen. This VR support will continue through the Horizon Worlds VR app, which Bosworth says will stay on Quest's store "for the foreseeable future". Specific worlds will not be recommended by the operating system, though, and nor will they be seen in the storefront. Horizon Worlds will be just another app on the store. As for the reason behind not supporting VR in Horizon Engine, Bosworth repeated the explanation he's been giving for two months now -- "because that's where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, and so we're leaning into that."

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Meta is shutting down its VR social platform Horizon Worlds, which was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse. The company said the app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from Quest headsets by June 15. After that date, it will shift to a standalone "mobile-only experience." CNBC reports: The shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company's push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse. [...] The social platform has never drawn more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month, CNBC previously reported. The virtual 3D social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023. The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, functioning similarly to Roblox.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company's most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the "year of efficiency." It employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing. The speculation follows a recent report from The New York Times claiming that Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after falling behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

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Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after internal tests showed it lagging behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The New York Times reports: The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta's previous A.I. model and did better than Google's Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said. As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado's release to at least May from this month, the people said. They added that the leaders of Meta's A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company's A.I. products, though no decisions have been reached. [...] It takes time to improve A.I. models, and Meta can still catch up to rivals, A.I. experts said. But a longer timeline has set in at the company, with Mr. Zuckerberg tempering expectations for Avocado in the past few months. "I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly will show the rapid trajectory we're on," he said on a call with investors in January. A Meta spokesperson said in a statement: "As we've said publicly, our next model will be good but, more importantly, show the rapid trajectory we're on, and then we'll steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models. We're excited for people to see what we've been cooking very soon."

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Axios reports that Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral, Reddit-like social network designed for AI agents. Humans are welcome, but only to observe. Axios reports: The deal brings Moltbook's creators -- Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr -- into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the unit run by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Meta did not disclose Moltbook's purchase price. The deal is expected to close mid-March, Meta says, with the pair starting at MSL on March 16. When it launched in late January, Moltbook was labeled the "most interesting place on the internet" by open-source developer and writer Simon Willison. "Browsing around Moltbook is so much fun. A lot of it is the expected science fiction slop, with agents pondering consciousness and identity. There's also a ton of genuinely useful information, especially on m/todayilearned." In an internal post seen by Axios, Meta's Vishal Shah said existing Moltbook customers can temporarily continue using the platform. "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." He added: "Their team has unlocked new ways for agents to interact, share content, and coordinate complex tasks."

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Matt Schlicht et Ben Parr, les deux fondateurs du réseau social dystopique Moltbook qui permet à des instances IA de discuter entre elles, rejoignent Meta. Le groupe de Mark Zuckerberg rachète le réseau social par la même occasion.

L’État islamique a perdu son territoire, mais pas sa capacité de diffusion. Selon un nouveau rapport de l’Institute for Strategic Dialogue, le groupe terroriste s’appuie désormais sur l’intelligence artificielle, des deepfakes et une stratégie multi-plateformes pour relayer ses messages.