#Meta

#Meta

One was a fairly traditional super PAC, announced via a splashy press release, with multiple major industry players planning to donate over $100 million to boost AI-friendly candidates across the country. The other was far more unusual. Meta had quietly filed to create the Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California, a state-only super PAC that would allow Meta to spend its own money to run political ads on behalf of their AI interests - and only their interests.

The FTC inquiry seeks to understand what steps, if any, companies have taken to evaluate the safety of their chatbots when acting as companions, to limit the products' use by and potential negative effects on children and teens, and to apprise users and parents of the risks associated with the products.

The feature, which has endured since the early days of the social-media platform, is still clinging to life and in fact being pushed again by Meta as a way to maintain connections with friends. Originally intended as a way to reach out to other users without actually sending a message or any meaningful content, it has been the focus of soft relaunches in 2017 and 2024.

When Mark Zuckerberg cozied up to Donald Trump at the beginning of this year, lots of folks chalked it up to fear. After all, they pointed out, Trump had previously threatened to throw the Meta CEO in jail. More prosaically, the US government that Trump was about to head up again was suing to break up Zuckerberg's company. But as we've pointed out here multiple times, Zuckerberg - and the rest of Big Tech's leaders - aren't just trying to stay off Trump's list of targets.

Even in the money-soaked world of AI, the hiring efforts of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg stood out this year as he enticed top machine learning researchers with payments reportedly reaching up to $1 billion to defect from their employers and come work for him instead. The overtures weren't always successful; in one embarrassing case, an individual was offered 10-figures to work at Meta's so-called Superintelligence initiative - but turned it down to stay at Thinking Machines Lab, a venture started by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati.

Speaking with Bloomberg about the tech industry's "overcorrection" toward Donald Trump and the president's isolationist attitudes, he called Silicon Valley "a place of stampedes and fads," and said that while the industry may pride itself on challenging norms, "it's the most conformist place I've ever lived in my life."

Google has won a six-year, $10 billion cloud contract from Meta, supporting the tech giant's plans to ramp up investment in AI. According to two people who spoke to , the deal covers the use of Google Cloud's datacenter servers, storage, networking and other services. A source close to Google has since told ITPro that the story is correct. The agreement is a big coup for Google, and follows a recent deal with OpenAI which saw it pry away business away from Microsoft Azure.

I really do believe that, despite its imperfections, social media has allowed billions of people ... to communicate with each other in a way that has never happened before,

To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,

Meta's new translation tools for Facebook and Instagram enable real-time conversion of user-generated content into multiple languages, facilitating wider accessibility of videos and reels internationally.

Google has agreed to pay a fine of AUS$55m in Australia after regulators ruled the company struck anti-competitive deals with major telecom operators, significantly impacting competition.