Social media companies like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are facing a long road of litigation over claims that they intentionally designed their products to be addictive to minors. According to a report from Reuters, San Francisco’s 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied these platforms’ attempt to defend themselves from thousands of lawsuits through…
Competing Android app stores are now back on Google Play in the U.S., and Aptoide is the first to take advantage of the new option. On Monday, the Portugal-based app distributor brought its games store back to Google Play after more than a decade, crediting the loosening of restrictions that had been criticized as anticompetitive….
Meta has released Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter multimodal model distilled from Muse Spark. It is tuned for always-on local agent workflows, and ships under Apache 2.0. A 30B model normally needs over 55 GB of memory at full precision. Meta compresses it to roughly 4-bit, then adds block-level speculative decoding so it answers fast enough…
Meta on Monday released Muse Glimmer, an open-weight model designed to power AI agents locally on consumer hardware, providing the clearest picture yet of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of “personal superintelligence” could look like in practice. The 30-billion parameter model is essentially an open version of Meta’s most powerful closed model, Muse Spark, which…
Sila has landed a $1.4 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Defense to help the U.S.-based startup expand production of its silicon-carbon battery material. The loan, which was announced Friday, arrives as U.S. battery buyers, from automotive companies to defense contractors, struggle to procure battery materials that are made outside of China. Most of…
Ceva Logistics, one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics giants, has been hacked. Several companies that rely on Ceva for shipping their products to their customers say that their personal information was also stolen in the breach. The cyberattack on Ceva is affecting at least eight warehouses across Europe used for shipping goods across…
Chips running AI workloads are too hot: That’s one reason why data centers consume so much electricity and require cooling systems. And, inevitably, entrepreneurs are turning to AI to solve the problem it created. Discovered Materials is the latest, with plans to use swarms of AI agents to find new materials that can be used…
Google said that it is adding Venmo as a payment option today on Google Play for purchases including games, apps, add-ons, and other digital content. The company said that users can use Venmo’s wallet or other linked payment methods, such as bank accounts and cards, to pay for subscriptions or tip creators within different content-based…
I was recently digging through my Instagram settings, trying to disable Meta’s now-defunct feature that allowed anyone to create AI deepfakes of me without consent. Anger bubbled up inside as I tapped through the Kafkaesque opt-out process. Rather than throwing my phone across the room, I blurted to my partner that we should leave San…
When Tim Millard obtained an e mail about interviewing for a media relations job in January, six months into his job hunt, he assumed he’d converse to a human. When he was as an alternative instructed to report himself answering a collection of questions on digicam, he felt a well-known pang of resignation—one which had…
