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Google releases pint-size Gemma open AI model

Big tech has spent the last few years creating ever-larger AI models, leveraging rack after rack of expensive GPUs to provide generative AI as a cloud service. But tiny AI matters, too. Google has announced a tiny version of its Gemma open model designed to run on local devices. Google says the new Gemma 3 270M can be tuned in a snap and maintains robust performance despite its small footprint. Google released its first Gemma 3 open models earlier this year, featuring between 1 billion and 27 b

One of the Most Prolific VR Headset Makers (Not Meta) Now Has Smart Glasses (Not Ray-Bans)

XR, or extended reality, headsets are on the outs, but smart glasses are eating more and more of what was once VR’s slice of the face-mounted wearables pie. HTC, one of the few lingering pioneers of VR headsets with its Vive series, couldn’t stand up to Meta’s Quest for cheap consumer virtual reality, but it may be able to shoulder in some room with a new pair of smart glasses that goes tit for tat with Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley HSTN smart eyewear. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have proved pop

Cohere hires long-time Meta research head Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer

Investors once saw Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build frontier AI models, with its backers pouring roughly $1 billion on their bet on CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern. But Cohere’s AI models have fallen behind the state-of-the-art, and its business hasn’t scaled like its competitors. Now, the company is bringing in a veteran research leader to revamp its AI ef

Thought HTC was dead? It just launched a surprisingly compelling Ray-Ban Meta rival

HTC Vive TL;DR HTC’s Vive division has announced a new pair of smart glasses called Eagle. These glasses come with a design similar to Ray-Ban Meta glasses but with better specifications and more colors. Unfortunately, HTC is limiting sales to Taiwan, unlike other Vive headsets that also sell globally. HTC has long given up on phones (except it hasn’t completely and still sells entry-level phones in certain markets). But its Vive division has continued to work on AR, VR, and XR headsets. It

Topics: ban glasses htc meta vive

HTC takes on Meta with the Vive Eagle smart glasses

HTC is once again attacking the wearable space with a pair of new smart glasses, the company announced. The Vive Eagle is a rival to Meta's Ray-Ban glasses with a fashion-foward lightweight design, open ear audio, voice-activated AI and an ultra-wide AI-powered camera. They look promising, if a bit expensive, but will only be available in Taiwan to start with. The Taiwanese firm clearly noticed that Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses have been a surprise hit. It's easy to see why — in our Engadget re

Topics: eagle htc meta ray vive

Researchers Harness Black Metal to Turbocharge Solar Power

Several years ago, an optics expert developed a technique for turning shiny metals pitch black. The trick resulted in a material perfectly suited for absorbing sunlight—so much so that generators built with it produced 15 times more power than comparable devices. The team used black metal to develop a new design for solar thermoelectric generators. Known as STEGs, they can convert various types of thermal energy into electricity. However, technological limitations significantly curbed their pot

Threads crosses 400M monthly active users as it gains on X

Following a recent series of welcome updates as Threads turned two, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that his X competitor crossed 400 million monthly active users (MAUs), a 50 million boost since April. Zuckerberg’s announcement today was short, but significant: The last time Meta detailed its monthly active user number was on April 30, during its Q1 2025 earnings call, up from 320 million in Q4 2024 in late January. If it keeps it stride, this means Meta could see north of 100M MAUs

The ex-CIA agents deciding Facebook's content policy (2022)

It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see. Aaron is being interviewed in a bright warehouse-turn

Here's How to Spot Bright Fireballs During the Dazzling Perseids Meteor Shower

Skygazers rejoice, the summer isn't finished with delivering dazzling meteor showers. The last week of July saw dueling meteor showers taking over the sky, but the most popular meteor shower of the year won't hit its peak until next week. The Perseids meteor shower is about to give you a real light show, provided you're far enough away from light pollution to see it. Perseids are known for their bright fireballs and plentiful meteors. The show started on July 17, and will run through Aug. 23.

Meteorite Crashes Into Georgia Home, Turns Out to Be 20 Million Years Older Than Earth

On a clear June day in Georgia, a blazing fireball suddenly fell out of the sky over the Atlanta metro area. The source of this spectacle was a 1-ton meteor that exploded in mid-air, sending a cherry tomato-sized fragment shooting through the roof of a McDonough home. Though no one knew it then, this space rock hailed from a time long before Earth had even formed. Using optical and electron microscopes, geologists at the University of Georgia analyzed 0.8 ounces (23 grams) of fragments recovere

Meta makes conservative activist an AI bias advisor following lawsuit

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Conservative activist Robby Starbuck will serve as an advisor at Meta to address “ideological and political bias” within the company’s AI chatbot, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The move comes as part of a settlement Meta reached with Starbu

Millau Viaduct

Bridges are often considered to belong to the realm of the engineer rather than that of the architect. But the architecture of infrastructure has a powerful impact on the environment and the Millau Viaduct, designed in close collaboration with structural engineers, illustrates how the architect can play an integral role in the design of bridges. It follows the Millennium Bridge over the River Thames in expressing a fascination with the relationship between function, technology and aesthetics in

From terabytes to insights: Real-world AI obervability architecture

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Consider maintaining and developing an e-commerce platform that processes millions of transactions every minute, generating large amounts of telemetry data, including metrics, logs and traces across multiple microservices. When critical incidents occur, on-call engineers face the daunting task of sifting through an ocean of data to unravel

Car has more than 1.2M km on it – and it's still going strong

A Nova Scotia man is the proud owner of a 1985 Toyota Tercel. Despite being 40 years old, the car is in mint condition. But there is one thing wrong with it: the odometer doesn't go up high enough. The CBC's Frances Willick explains. If you were to spot Andy Campbell's ride on the road, you might not think too much about it. Maybe you'd think it's a bit dated — a throwback to an earlier time when cassette tapes were all the rage and backup cameras were just a glimmer in a car designer's eye.

After a Summer of Chaos, OpenAI Strikes Back

OpenAI just had its best week in months. And it desperately needed it. The San Francisco-based company, best known for ChatGPT, has spent much of June and July in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. First came the talent raid: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened the checkbook, reportedly offering hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to lure away OpenAI’s top researchers. Several jumped ship. CEO Sam Altman publicly lashed out, calling Meta’s approach mercenary and accusing it of hav

The winners and losers in tech's AI-powered ad race

In this article META GOOGL RDDT SNAP PINS Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT watch now Artificial intelligence has been a shot in the arm for digital advertising. Meta and Alphabet both reported sales and earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations, but the strength in digital ad spend was notable. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that AI helped imbue "greater efficiency and gains across our ad system," thus contributing to the 22% year-over-year increa

Facebook and Instagram may be down for some users

Meta is apparently experiencing some capacity of server issues today. According to Downdetector, user reports of Facebook and Instagram not refreshing have spiked recently. Meta hasn’t acknowledged any outage on its system status page yet, and Facebook appears to be loading fine here. But if you’re having issues loading either app today, Downdetector shows that you’re not alone. ❗️Can't refresh your feed or messages on Facebook and Instagram? You're not alone! Downdetector users have been

Meta Says ‘Big Wearable’ News Is Coming, but There’s Only One Thing I Want to Know

Meta has been on a pretty serious campaign to prove it’s at the cutting edge of consumer tech, and AI isn’t the only target on the board. AR/XR has also clearly been a priority if the last few weeks are any indication (see this paper in Nature about its wristband tech and drips on groundbreaking VR research for proof), and its vision on that front is starting to actually take shape. According to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the company’s annual Connect conference in September, where it showcases t

Tech is getting a boost from AI ad tools. Some companies are being left behind

In this article META GOOGL RDDT SNAP PINS Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images Artificial intelligence has been a shot in the arm for digital advertising. Meta and Alphabet both reported sales and earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations, but the strength in digital ad spend was notable. Meta CEO Mark Zuck

Meta acquires AI audio startup WaveForms

In Brief Meta has acquired AI voice startup WaveForms for an undisclosed sum, The Information reports. It’s the company’s latest buy to strengthen its new AI unit, Superintelligence Labs, and Meta’s second major AI audio acquisition in the last month after it bought PlayAI. WaveForms, founded just eight months ago, raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz in a round that valued the company at $160 million pre-money, per PitchBook data. Two of the startup’s co-founders – former Meta and Ope

The Morning After: Meta teases high-spec VR headset prototypes

Meta previewed some of its latest virtual reality prototypes this week and plans to demo them at next week’s SIGGRAPH conference. The aim, according to Meta’s blog post, is to offer VR experiences “indistinguishable from the physical world” — something it says no present-day VR system has yet done. It wants to surpass what it terms the visual Turing test. “Our mission for this project was to provide the best image quality possible,” said Xuan Wang, an optical research scientist with Reality Lab

Meta says these wild headset prototypes could be the future of VR

Meta previewed some of its latest virtual reality prototypes this week, with concepts that are compelling on the specs and long on the design. Literally. The company shared some details on its Tiramisu project, dubbing it "hyperrealistic VR." This set promises three times the contrast, 14 times the maximum brightness and 3.6 times the angular resolution of the Meta Quest 3. In actual stats, that's up to 1,400 nits of brightness and an angular resolution of 90 pixels per degree. One of the goals

‘Dan Da Dan’ Just Added Heavy Metal Exorcisms to Its Raucous Anime Medley

Dan Da Dan season 2 has consecutively become the talk of the anime community online, with each passing episode becoming another grand moment in its rise to become the main character of the internet. Its latest anime feat sees the show go full death metal in a raucous exorcism. In Dan Da Dan episode 6, titled “We Became A Family,” Okarun, Momo, and crew are quite literally picking up the pieces from Evil Eye’s sudden attack inside the Ayase house. In the previous episode, which featured the anim

Meta Says Its Comically Large VR Headset Prototype Can Almost Mimic Human Sight

There are a lot of lofty goals in the world of VR, but delivering hyperrealism is among the most elusive. That’s because there are tons of constraints with a realistic, world-rendering face computer: there’s resolution, field of view, power, weight, battery—you name it. But just because obstacles abound doesn’t mean the titans of XR and VR aren’t trying, and when it comes to the ol’ college try, Meta definitely gets an A for effort. In its latest endeavor, Meta unveiled Tiramisu, a new headset

California jury rules Meta violated privacy law in case involving period-tracking app

A California jury ruled against Meta in a privacy-related lawsuit involving the alleged collection of sensitive data from Flo, a period-tracking app. The jury ruled that the plaintiffs proved that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act, according to a verdict form filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for Northern District of California. The ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit dating back to 2021 against the health-tech company Flo Health and other businesses like Meta, Go

Meta’s prototype headsets show off the future of mixed reality

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Meta’s consumer VR headsets are already among the best you can get for their price points, but at a conference next week, the company is showing off some impressive-sounding research prototypes that could be a peek at what its headsets might be capable of in the future. One headset, called “Tiramisu,” brings a “new milestone for realism in VR,” Meta says in a blog post. Tiram

The Download: how AI is improving itself, and hidden greenhouse gases

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta aims to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta Superintelligence Labs with nine-figure offers. The second ingredient is AI itself. Zuckerberg recently said on an earnings call that Meta will focus on building self-improving AI—systems that can bootstrap themselves to higher and higher levels of performa

You Can Still See Bright Fireballs During the Perseids Meteor Shower

Skygazers rejoice, the summer isn't finished with delivering dazzling meteor showers. The last week of July saw dueling meteor showers taking over the sky, but the most popular meteor shower of the year won't hit its peak until next week. The Perseids meteor shower is about to give you a real light show, provided you're far enough away from light pollution to see it. Perseids are known for their bright fireballs and plentiful meteors. The show started on July 17, and will run through Aug. 23.

Jury Decides Meta Stole Data from Users of Period-Tracking App. What to Do If You're Worried

A California jury ruled Wednesday that Meta broke state privacy laws by collecting data from the popular period-tracking app Flo, including private health data and pregnancy goals. The case claimed that, among other actions, Meta used the data to create targeted advertising content. As Meta claims it will fight the verdict, the court continues to decide specific financial damages -- and the plaintiffs have asked for billions. A representative for Meta did not immediately respond to a request fo

Topics: app data flo meta privacy

Meta introduces new tools to help identify scam messages on WhatsApp

It seems scarcely a week goes by now without receiving at least one job scam message on either iMessage or WhatsApp. Meta has now introduced two new tools to help you identify scams, whether they arrive as individual messages or as posts to group chats … Scams are big business Scamming is big business these days, and it’s common for messages to originate from organized criminal gangs using huge banks of smartphones to send hundreds of thousands of messages per day. Meta has teams of people t