Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face. At …
Read More »Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP
This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands …
Read More »Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound
Off the two-lane highway that winds along the northeast side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai, on a quiet stretch of ranchland between the tourist hubs of Kapaa and Hanalei, an enormous, secret construction project is underway. A 6-foot wall blocks the view from a nearby road fronting the project, …
Read More »Will Life Be Better in the Metaverse?
“I kind of want to live in the metaverse. There will be all the same stuff as my regular universe—friends, work, shopping, entertainment—but it will somehow be more thrilling. When I move, will I still be myself?” —Virtual Horizons Dear Virtual, It’s hard to believe that only two years have …
Read More »Here's a New Plan to Rein In the Gilded Tech Bros
When I first heard in 2013 that Barack Obama had chosen Tom Wheeler to head the crucial tech regulator that is the US Federal Communications Commission, my first thought was … what a sell-out! The new FCC boss had previously been head lobbyist for not one, but two industries: cable …
Read More »Hey Zuck, Get Those Robots out of My Social Feed
Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote presentation at the Meta Connect event this week started late. The delay was on-brand for the company’s decade-long project to make virtual reality mainstream. Back in 2014, a demo of the then-primitive Oculus VR headset hit Zuckerberg like a lightning bolt, and within weeks he owned the …
Read More »The Meta AI Chatbot Is Mark Zuckerberg's Answer to ChatGPT
Meta is introducing a virtual assistant today to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT that can serve up answers to questions from Microsoft’s Bing search engine and generate images from text commands. Meta AI, as the assistant is called, is powered by the company’s large language model Llama 2. As well as chatting …
Read More »Meta’s Smart Glasses and VR Headset Now Serve Up a Bigger Dose of Reality
The face-computing metaverse still hasn’t gone mainstream, but that isn’t stopping Meta from trying to make it so. Today Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed full details about two new hardware products: an updated virtual reality Quest headset and a new set of Meta-powered smart glasses made by Ray-Ban. The …
Read More »Inside the Senate’s Private AI Meeting With Tech’s Billionaire Elites
US senators are proving slow studies when it comes to the generative artificial intelligence tools that are poised to upend life as we know it. But they’ll be tested soon—and the rest of us through them—if their new private tutors are to be trusted. In a historic first, yesterday upwards …
Read More »Senators Want ChatGPT-Level AI to Require a Government License
The US government should create a new body to regulate artificial intelligence—and restrict work on language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to companies granted licenses to do so. That’s the recommendation of a bipartisan duo of senators, Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Josh Hawley, who launched a legislative framework yesterday to …
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