Meta

Facebook renamed itself Meta to reflect its focus on expanding the Metaverse, but its development of Facebook and Instagram, its biggest platforms, have become increasingly focused around AI. It has taken an open-source approach with its Llama large language model, while also continuing to try to unseat X with its still-new microblogging challenger Threads, and TechCrunch is covering all of its moves and updates across its many platforms.

A day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about his newest social media experiment Threads reaching “almost” 200 million users on the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, the platform has…

Meta’s Threads crosses 200 million active users

Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg…

Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3

WhatsApp’s massive 500 million users in India have supercharged Meta’s AI ambitions. Meta CFO Susan Li said Wednesday that India is the largest market in terms of Meta AI usage,…

Meta says India is the largest market for Meta AI usage

Google has released a trio of new, “open” generative AI models that it’s calling “safer,” “smaller” and “more transparent” than most — a bold claim, to be sure. They’re additions…

Google releases new ‘open’ AI models with a focus on safety

Meta agrees to pay the state of Texas $1.4 billion over five years, and the first payment of $500 million is due in the next month, according to a court…

Meta will pay Texas $1.4B in settlement over facial recognition software

Meta said Monday that it is rolling out its AI studio to all creators in the U.S. to let them make personalized AI-powered chatbots. The company first announced the AI…

Meta is rolling out its AI Studio in the US for creators to build AI chatbots

Meta’s machine learning model, Segment Anything, has a sequel: It now takes the model to the video domain, showing how fast the field is moving.

Zuckerberg touts Meta’s latest video vision AI with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

OpenAI is testing SearchGPT, a new AI search experience to compete directly with Google. The feature aims to elevate search queries with “timely answers” from across the internet and allows…

OpenAI comes for Google with SearchGPT

WhatsApp has recently ramped up its marketing push in the U.S.

Mark Zuckerberg says WhatsApp has 100M monthly active users in the US

Meta’s AI integrations into apps like Instagram and Facebook have felt pretty useless so far. If I’m just trying to find my friend’s Instagram, why…

TechCrunch Minute: Meta’s new ‘Imagine me’ feature lets you generate AI selfies

The Board wants Meta to change the terminology it uses for labeling explicit, AI-generated images from “derogatory” to “non-consensual.”

Oversight Board wants Meta to refine its policies around AI-generated explicit images

The Overture Maps Foundation is today releasing data sets for 2.3B building “footprints” globally, 54M notable places of interest, a visual overlay of “boundaries,” and land and water features such…

Backed by Microsoft, AWS and Meta, the Overture Maps Foundation launches its first open map datasets

Content creators are busy people. Most spend more than 20 hours a week creating new content for their respective corners of the web. That doesn’t leave much time for audience…

Mark Zuckerberg imagines content creators making AI clones of themselves

Meta’s latest open source AI model is its biggest yet. Today, Meta said it is releasing Llama 3.1 405B, a model containing 405 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a…

Meta releases its biggest ‘open’ AI model yet

Meta has been given until September 1 to respond to consumer protection concerns in the European Union. The Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network, a network of authorities responsible for the…

Meta given weeks to tell EU consumer protection authorities how it’ll fix ‘pay or consent’

Meta has suspended the use of its AI assistant after Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) banned the company from training its AI models on personal data from Brazilians. The…

Meta puts a halt to training its generative AI tools in Brazil 

This is a guide on how to check whether someone compromised your online accounts.

How to tell if your online accounts have been hacked

Meta announced former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts will no longer be subject to heightened suspension penalties, according to an updated blog post on Friday. The company says…

Meta removes special restrictions for Trump’s account ahead of 2024 elections

Meta announced on Wednesday that users aged 10 to 12 will soon be able to interact with others in VR if they have their parents’ approval to do so. Up…

Meta will soon let kids aged 10 to 12 interact with others in VR with their parents’ approval

Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. After launching on July 5 last year, the social network has reached 175 million monthly active users — that’s a…

A year later, what Threads could learn from other social networks

Meta’s Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes two days away from Threads’ first anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed back in…

Threads nears its one-year anniversary with more than 175M monthly active users

Meta plans to bring more generative AI tech into games, specifically VR, AR and mixed reality games, as the company looks to reinvigorate its flagging metaverse strategy. According to a…

Meta plans to bring generative AI to metaverse games

After Meta started tagging photos with a “Made with AI” label in May, photographers complained that the social networking company had been applying labels to real photos where they had…

Meta changes its label from ‘Made with AI’ to ‘AI info’ to indicate use of AI in photos

The EC has found that Meta’s “pay or consent” offer to Facebook and Instagram users in Europe does not comply with the bloc’s DMA.

Meta’s ‘pay or consent’ model fails EU competition rules, Commission finds

In the conversation, Zuckerberg said there needs to be a lot of different AIs that get created to reflect people’s different interests.

Zuckerberg disses closed-source AI competitors as trying to ‘create God’

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company will begin to surface AI characters made by creators through Meta AI studio on Instagram. The tests will begin in…

Meta starts testing user-created AI chatbots on Instagram

Meta has fixed the bug that caused people to believe the company had adjusted their selections in a political content settings tool without their consent. The issue had impacted users…

Just in time for the debates, Meta fixes bug impacting users’ political content settings on Instagram and Threads

Photographers are claiming that Meta is tagging their real photos as “Made with AI.”  Meta introduced this automated tag to help people understand when what…

TechCrunch Minute: Meta is labeling real photos as ‘Made with AI’

Days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple and Meta were in talks to integrate the latter’s AI models, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said that the iPhone maker was not…

Apple shelved the idea of integrating Meta’s AI models over privacy concerns, report says

After a few months of testing during the general elections, Meta is making its Llama 3-powered AI chatbot available to all users in India. However, Meta AI currently only supports…

Meta makes its AI chatbot available to all users in India