An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US supreme court grappled on Wednesday with a bid by Meta's Facebook to scuttle a federal securities fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders who accused the social media platform of misleading them about the misuse of user data. The justices heard arguments in Facebook's appeal of a lower court's decision allowing the 2018 class action suit led by Amalgamated Bank to proceed. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages in part to recoup the lost value of the Facebook stock held by the investors. It is one of two cases coming before them this month -- the other one involving artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on 13 November -- that could lead to rulings making it harder for private litigants to hold companies to account for alleged securities fraud. At issue is whether Facebook broke the law when it failed to detail the prior data breach in subsequent business-risk disclosures, and instead portrayed the risk of such incidents as purely hypothetical. Facebook argued in a supreme court brief that it was not required to reveal that its warned-of risk had already materialized because "a reasonable investor" would understand risk disclosures to be forward-looking statements. "When we think about these questions, we're not looking only to lies or complete false statements," the liberal justice Elena Kagan told Kannon Shanmugam, the lawyer for Facebook. "We're also looking to misleading statements or misleading omissions." The conservative justice Samuel Alito asked Shanmugam: "Isn't it the case that an evaluation of risks is always forward-looking?" "It is. And that is essentially what underlies our argument here," Shanmugam responded. The plaintiffs accused Facebook of misleading investors in violation of the Securities Exchange Act, a 1934 federal law that requires publicly traded companies to disclose their business risks. They claimed the company unlawfully withheld information from investors about a 2015 data breach involving British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica that affected more than 30 million Facebook users. Edward Davila, a US district judge, dismissed the lawsuit but the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals revived it. The supreme court's ruling is expected by the end of June.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Plans by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to build an AI data centre in the US that runs on nuclear power were thwarted in part because a rare species of bee was discovered on land earmarked for the project, according to people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data centre supporting his artificial intelligence ambitions. However, the potential deal faced multiple complications including environmental and regulatory challenges, these people said. The discovery of the rare bee species on a location next to the plant where the data centre was to be built would have complicated the project, Zuckerberg told a Meta all-hands meeting last week, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

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The Washington Post reports that America's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) "is considering legal action against Meta over allegations that it improperly used financial data obtained from third parties in its highly-lucrative advertising business..." The article says a Meta securities filing Thursday revealed it had received a formal notification about the federal investigation last month. The filing said only that the inquiry relates to "advertising for financial products and services on our platform." A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment on the investigation. "We disagree with the claims," the company's filing said, "and believe an enforcement action is unwarranted...." The CFPB's probe underscores its aggressive recent focus on Big Tech. In recent years, major companies including Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have launched a wave of new financial services, including credit cards and apps that help users send money to friends... Under its current director, Rohit Chopra, the CFPB has also sought to ensure that tech giants adhere to the same safeguards that have long applied to their brick-and-mortar banking predecessors. The bureau formalized its tech crackdown in 2021, when Chopra ordered companies including Facebook to turn over records related to their payment apps and other financial service offerings. At the time, he expressed fear that these giants already possessed troves of customer data and could solidify their dominance if they gained greater insight into users' purchasing and spending habits. "This data can be monetized by companies that seek to profit from behavioral targeting, particularly around advertising and e-commerce," Chopra said in a statement announcing the review. "That many Big Tech companies aspire to grow in this space only heightens these concerns." Since then, the watchdog agency has proposed new rules that could treat Apple, Google and PayPal-owned Venmo more like banks, opening the door for federal regulators to inspect some of their operations in a bid to protect users' deposits. The rules, which have not been finalized, have sparked fierce lobbying opposition from major tech companies.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid down the newest marker in generative AI training on Wednesday, saying that the next major release of the company's Llama model is being trained on a cluster of GPUs that's "bigger than anything" else that's been reported. From a report: Llama 4 development is well underway, Zuckerberg told investors and analysts on an earnings call, with an initial launch expected early next year. "We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing," Zuckerberg said, referring to the Nvidia chips popular for training AI systems. "I expect that the smaller Llama 4 models will be ready first." Increasing the scale of AI training with more computing power and data is widely believed to be key to developing significantly more capable AI models. While Meta appears to have the lead now, most of the big players in the field are likely working toward using compute clusters with more than 100,000 advanced chips. In March, Meta and Nvidia shared details about clusters of about 25,000 H100s that were used to develop Llama 3.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was "on track" to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company's latest earnings call. The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the "most-used" assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is measuring that metric. Zuck said that AI-driven improvements in feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and 5% increase on Instagram this year. Advertisers have also leveraged the company's AI tools to generate over 15 million ads in just the past month. Separately, Meta's Threads app is gaining over a million new sign-ups daily, with nearly 275 million total monthly users.

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First we had friends. Then we had influencers. And if Mark Zuckerberg is correct, the next big thing in our social media feeds will be AI generated content. Lots of it. Fortune: Zuckerberg described our future feeds during Facebook-parent company Meta's third quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, describing it as a natural evolution. "I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way," the Meta CEO said. "And I think that that's gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time." Zuckerberg touted the company's Llama large language model and the success of products it powers, such as the Meta AI chatbot that is now used by more than 500 million users every month. But Llama will increasingly play a role across Meta's business, Zuckerberg said, including tools for business customers and advertisers. As AI tools become more widespread, AI content will proliferate within social media feeds. Such feeds are actively being worked on inside Meta, Zuckerberg noted. "It's something we're starting to test different things around." "I don't know if we know what's exactly going to work really well yet, but some things are really promising," he added. "I have high confidence that over the next several years, this will be one of the important trends and one of the important applications."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As Meta tries to keep up with OpenAI in developing AI, the Facebook owner is working on a search engine [non-paywalled link] that crawls the web to provide conversational answers about current events to people using its Meta AI chatbot. In doing so, Meta hopes to lower its reliance on Google Search and Microsoft's Bing, which currently provide information about news, sports and stocks to people using Meta AI, according to a person who has spoken with the search engine team. It could also give Meta a backup option if Google or Microsoft withdrew from these arrangements, according to a person who has been involved with the strategy.

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According to The Verge, Meta has "begun laying off employees across various departments, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs." From the report: Rather than a mass, companywide layoff, these smaller cuts seem to coincide with reorganizations of specific teams. Some Meta employees have started posting that they've been laid off. Among them is Jane Manchun Wong, who gained notoriety for reporting on unannounced features coming to apps before joining the Threads team in 2023. Meta laid off 11,000 employees in 2022 and then cut 10,000 more people as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" in 2023. Further reading: Tech Layoffs Highest Since Dot-Com Crash

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Meta has confirmed that it may use images analyzed by its Ray-Ban Meta AI smart glasses for AI training. The policy applies to users in the United States and Canada who share images with Meta AI, according to the company. While photos captured on the device are not used for training unless submitted to AI, any image shared for analysis falls under different policies, potentially contributing to Meta's AI model development. Further reading: Meta's Smart Glasses Repurposed For Covert Facial Recognition.

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Two Harvard students have developed smart glasses with facial recognition capabilities, sparking debate over privacy and surveillance. The project, dubbed I-XRAY, uses Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses coupled with facial recognition software to identify strangers and retrieve personal information about them. AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the creators, tested the technology on unsuspecting individuals in public spaces. The glasses scan faces, match them against online databases, and display personal details on a smartphone within seconds. The students claim their project aims to raise awareness about potential privacy risks.

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Meta Platforms' claims that Facebook doesn't polarize Americans came under new doubt as the journal Science raised questions about a prominent research paper the tech giant has cited to support its position. WSJ: In an editorial Thursday, Science said that Meta's emergency efforts to calm its platforms in the wake of the 2020 election may have swayed the conclusions of the paper, which the journal published in July 2023. The editorial, titled "Context matters in social media," was prompted by a letter that Science also published presenting new criticism of the paper. Because the study of Facebook's algorithms relied on data provided by Meta when it was undertaking extraordinary efforts to restrain incendiary political content, the letter's authors argue that the paper may have overstated the case that social media algorithms didn't contribute to political polarization. Such criticisms of peer-reviewed research often appear below papers in academic journals, but Science's editors felt their editorial was needed to more prominently caveat this original paper's conclusions, said Holden Thorp, Science's editor in chief. "It was incumbent on us to come up with a way somehow that people who would come to the paper would know of these concerns,â Thorp said in an interview. While no correction was warranted, he said, "There's an election coming up, and we care about people citing this paper." Meta said it had been transparent with researchers about its actions during the time of the study, and the company and its research partners say it had no control over the Science paper's conclusions. Meta called debates of the sort aired on Thursday as part of the research process.

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Meta unveiled prototype AR glasses codenamed Orion on Wednesday, featuring a 70-degree field of view, Micro LED projectors, and silicon carbide lenses that beam graphics directly into the wearer's eyes. In an interview with The Verge, CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the device's capabilities, including ingredient recognition, holographic gaming, and video calling, controlled by a neural wristband that interprets hand gestures through electromyography. Despite technological advances, Meta has shelved Orion's commercial release, citing manufacturing complexities and costs reaching $10,000 per unit, primarily due to difficulties in producing the silicon carbide lenses. The company now aims to launch a refined, more affordable version in coming years, with executives hinting at a price comparable to high-end smartphones and laptops. Zuckerberg views AR glasses as critical to Meta's future, potentially freeing the company from its reliance on smartphone platforms controlled by Apple and Google. The push into AR hardware comes as tech giants and startups intensify competition in the space, with Apple launching Vision Pro and Google partnering with Magic Leap and Samsung on headset development.

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