GoKawiil
Tech News
Meta is pursuing a bond sale of between $20 billion and $25 billion on Tuesday, split roughly two-thirds in dollars and one-third in euros, according to people familiar with the matter. The offering follows Meta's disclosure last month that full-year capital expenditure will reach $135-145 billion, and comes after S&P Global Ratings revised its outlook on the company to negative.
Meta took down multiple accounts that were sharing AI-generated videos depicting coaches inappropriately touching and kissing young athletes. The company had initially determined the content did not violate its community standards before reversing course and removing it.
No Kings Coalition says Meta would not commit to safeguards against automated suspensions of its Instagram account during the midterm elections, after Meta apologized for a four-hour outage of the account caused by its use of a Claude AI tool. Meta offered a technical briefing instead of the leadership meeting the group wanted, and at an October 30 meeting told the coalition it has no plans to change the enforcement policies behind the suspension.
Meta announced that its Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets will stop receiving operating system updates after March 2027, though security patches will keep arriving through the end of that year. The company said compatible games, multiplayer cross-play, and PC VR via Meta Quest Link will keep working, and developers can continue updating existing titles as long as they give users six months' notice before ending support.
Snap has settled a lawsuit filed by two teens, identified as K.D.B. and S.J., who alleged Snapchat use contributed to self-harm and mental health problems. The settlement came after jury selection had already begun and just before trial was set to start this month, with terms undisclosed. Meta had settled its portion of the same case shortly before, leaving Snap as the sole remaining defendant.
Meta's AI shopping assistant Muse is running into resistance from major retailers when it tries to complete purchases on users' behalf. Amazon has deliberately blocked Muse from shopping on its site, according to TechCrunch, while Walmart says its verification checks weren't designed to target the assistant but are tripping it up anyway.
Owners of small business websites say they are being hit with heavy traffic from Meta's AI web crawlers, straining servers and disrupting normal operations. The complaints follow Meta's announcement of upcoming terms changes that would expand how AI crawlers can access data from business accounts.
Meta announced that version 213 will be the final operating system update for its Quest 2 and Quest Pro VR headsets, arriving by March 2027. After that, the company will only provide security patches and critical bug fixes through the end of 2027, and developers can still submit compatible apps until December 2027. Meta now describes Quest 3 and Quest 3S as the baseline devices for its VR platform.
Facebook accounts are posting AI-generated, near-photorealistic videos depicting male coaches inappropriately touching young female gymnasts, dancers and yoga practitioners, some appearing to be teenagers. Users who reported the content say Meta has declined to remove it, even though the clips depict groping, kissing and touching framed as normal interactions between coaches and athletes. A safe-sport advocate quoted in the report calls the material abuse content that sexualizes and normalizes real power imbalances in youth sports.
A WIRED investigation identified a network of more than 400 connected apps and domains, including apps posing as pet-portrait or fitness-coaching tools, that secretly offer AI tools for generating explicit deepfake images and videos from uploaded photos. The scenes include depictions of sexual assault, and the apps were promoted through ads on Meta's Facebook and Instagram, some of which contained AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Users could pay for the service through Apple and Google's payment systems, and the apps appeared in Apple's and Google's app stores despite platform policies against such content.
Courtrooms in England, Wales and New York have barred AI glasses like Meta's, and many schools and corporate offices are following suit, citing concerns over hidden cameras and microphones. Meta has also faced scrutiny after reports that outsourced workers reviewed intimate images and videos captured by its smart glasses, which the company says is done to improve the product.
Weeks after Trump directed federal agencies to use 'super intelligence' instead of 'artificial intelligence,' Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg used the term during their companies' recent earnings calls, with Musk renaming SpaceX's AI unit SpaceXSI. Other executives, including Amazon's Andy Jassy, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, stuck largely with 'AI' in their public remarks, while IBM's Arvind Krishna and Intel's Lip-Bu Tan used both terms interchangeably.