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2026-08-28 19:38:06

🔗 Mark Zuckerberg is Buying Meta a Seat at the AI Table. Does He Know What to Do With It? • Fast Company

There's a lot of positive buzz around Meta's AI efforts at the moment – if nothing else, it's impressive the speed at which they've zoomed back at least near the frontier. Can the forthcoming 'Watermelon' model fully get them there? Or set some kind of new mark? We should see soon enough, but more important for Meta will be creating an actual product people want to use AI for. Will 'Hatch' be the consumer harness that matters? The "OpenClaw for Normies" that I've been waiting for?

I remain skeptical simply because of Meta's recent history. When they can't buy, they've had trouble building products that actually resonate of late. It seemed like they found their buy-in here with Manus, but, well, China had other ideas. So the question in my mind is if they controlled the company long enough to effectively clone the IP before they had to give it back?

Anyway, this dive into Meta's history with AI by Harry McCracken gives some important context for the go-forward story. (And I swear I'm not just saying that because I'm quoted twice in the piece.) Mark Zuckerberg certainly gets credit for some early insight into AI being important back in 2013 when he hired Yann LeCun – but this was also because he had just lost the bidding to buy DeepMind. (And in pretty embarrassing fashion, according to subsequent reporting.) This directly led to the creation of PyTorch, the open source deep learning library which Meta absolutely does deserve credit for and propelled the entire field forward.

But as for the "open" strategy with their actual early Llama models, people forget, but that was decidedly more complicated:

While Zuckerberg was selling the world on headsets and smart glasses, a twist of fate helped propel Meta near the forefront of AI labs—at least for a time. In February 2023, Meta announced a new LLM called Llama (for Large Language Meta AI). At first, it planned to share its creation with academic researchers on a case-by-case basis. But a week later, as the world was still wrapping its mind around the three-month-old ChatGPT, a leaked version showed up on the dark web site 4chan. Suddenly, Llama was available to anyone who could figure out how to download and install it. And anyone who did could modify the code to suit their own purposes. Llama’s unintentional release led to fears of it being misused by bad actors. Some of that played out, including the creation of a Llama-powered Discord bot that spewed hate speech. But there was also excitement about the freely available model’s potential to democratize the spread of useful forms of AI.

Meta had been distributing the Llama weights to outside researchers, which is undoubtedly how they leaked, but there was no indication that this was the actual strategy for the general public. In fact, when it happened, everyone was scared shitless that Meta has just recklessly endangered the world! That was overblown, of course, and so it (retroactively – though undoubtedly guided by Meta's previous success with opening up some of their core technologies, including the aforementioned PyTorch) became the strategy:

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google tightly control their primary models. Zuckerberg realized he could drive improvements more quickly by sharing Meta’s work. The prospect rattled other companies. “Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta,” wrote Google engineer Luke Sernau in an internal memo published by SemiAnalysis. “Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet’s worth of free labor.” Less than five months later, Meta leaned into that advantage. Rather than vetting users, the company simply released Llama 2 to the public as an open-weight model. (AI purists use this term for models such as Llama, whose training data remains proprietary, making them less than fully open source.)

Then came Llama 3, which was an even bigger success. Meta seemed to be off to the races with Zuckerberg talking up "open" models non-stop on every stage (and every podcast) that he could. Then the record scratch...

Instead of cementing Meta (and "open" models) as the leader in AI, Llama 4 was an unmitigated disaster. The gaming of leaderboards was a symptom, not the cause. While it was easy to blame "open", the reality was that Meta got outflanked by other models using mixture-of-experts (MoE) techniques to train. That was perhaps the biggest revelation of the "DeepSeek Moment", for Meta at least. Well that, and the notion that distillation of models can work quite well – perhaps especially if your model happens to have open weights.¹

And so "open" was closed. And Llama was killed. Scale was "hackquired". And billions were burned (on both talent and compute). Again, the initial results look pretty good. But then came the "Kimi K3 Moment" mixed with the "AI Overkill" movement (and the Anthropic heel turn, and ongoing OpenAI backlash), and suddenly "open" was cool again! As such, Meta quickly pivoted back – though not fully this time – just in a way to try to take advantage of the marketing and framing as they try to re-establish themselves externally – and re-align themselves internally.

Back in 2015, Zuckerberg had proudly told me that his success as a CEO had come from the effort he put into “building a culture where people think about the mission in the same way that I do.” Now that synchronicity seems to be gone, at least for the moment. According to a current MSL staffer, employees in the lab regard Zuckerberg’s “personal superintelligence” talk as sloganeering, not a road map for building useful products. One Silicon Valley insider says the richly compensated AI recruits he knows at the company are “mercenaries,” there “to ride this out for as long as Zuck’s interests hold and take as much money off the table as possible.” Morale among longer-serving staffers, who have seen friends and mentors depart by edict or choice, has cratered, says the MSL employee.

"Sloganeering" is a great term. I still think if they nail 'Watermelon' (and can they come up with a better name than 'Muse Spark' for it?) and certainly 'Hatch' these problems will fade away. Success has a funny way of changing perception, fast and clearing up any internal morale issues. We'll see, it's nearly the end of this particular race...

¹ Models which many other Big Tech companies were also happy to use, but not pay for, which was obviously an issue for Meta as well given the costs. It's almost like they needed a cloud... ↩

2026-08-27 21:36:13

🔗 Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims • NYT

On one level, it's just math. $17.1 billion is less than $200 billion (the amount the states were seeking in damages). And certainly less than $1.4 trillion (the amount Meta claimed they could be on the hook for if they lost such a case – which happens to also be roughly their current market cap). Meta generates $17.1 billion in revenue every 26 days or so. Yes, Meta makes more money in a month than these settlement damages.

Also, those damages will be paid out over a decade. Also, also, they may not even be $17.1 billion, but instead more like $12 billion unless TikTok and YouTube also agree to similar settlements including damages and product changes! Oh and need I mention that Meta's market cap jumped about $50 billion on the news of the settlement?¹

So yeah, this is one of those losses that seems like a win.

Yes, yes, technically it wasn't a loss at all, just a settlement without admitting any wrongdoing. But come on. Unlike the (pointless) antitrust case against Meta, which they rode through to the (easy) victory in the end, the company clearly read the writing on the Facebook Wall here. Money aside, optically, this was doing yet more damage to Meta's brand and reputation. Every story every day was equating their products to the new tobacco. And Mark Zuckerberg was about to have to take the stand. The media frenzy would have turned into Shark Week, with Zuck as the chum.

Oh would you look at that, a new trailer for The Social Reckoning just dropped. What an inconvenient coincidence!

So yeah, the settlement was a no-brainer. To the point where I'm honestly shocked the states agreed to it. Yes, $17 billion seems like a massive headline amount of money, and the payouts to each state ranging from hundreds of millions to billions (depending on population) will be meaningful to their budgets. But it's simply not a meaningful amount of money to Meta.

Far more interesting are the product changes that Meta is promising alongside the settlement. "Night Mode" and "School Mode" implemented at a service-level sound fine on paper, but in practice, are they actually going to work? A big part of the abbreviated trial was all about how such tools don't really work. Yes, the default positions will help, but how hard will it be for little Timmy to ask a parent to click this thing for them while they're busy on a million other things?²

Even more interesting is Meta's jiu-jitsu maneuver to turn this whole thing against their main rivals. The states will all now obviously be heavily incentivized to go after each of them to maximize their payouts. Meanwhile, Meta gets to frame themselves as the leader in teen safety here. As Casey Newton writes in Platformer:

Whether American teenagers should be harassed after 10 p.m. by engagement-baiting push notifications ought to be a matter for Congress, not the social media cartel. But with characteristic gall, Meta is seeking to position its game of prisoner’s dilemma with YouTube and TikTok as moral leadership.

The wolves are leading the call to stop other animals from attacking the henhouse! With an "open letter" running in national newspapers! This is some real Don Draper-level shit. Anthropic, eat your heart out.³

Naturally, such moral leadership only applies to the US, it seems.

So Meta can get back to work with the money printer largely intact. And this matters as that money needs to flow directly into their AI buildout. And potential damages aside, had Meta lost this case, it would have undoubtedly further spooked investors away from helping Meta to fund that buildout.

Yet risks remain, as Jyoti Mann and Aaron Holmes of The Information point out:

But unlike the big tobacco settlement, which effectively shielded firms from most future lawsuits by states and individuals, Wednesday’s agreement doesn’t resolve the thousands of open lawsuits brought against Meta by consumers, school districts and other parties. Also unlike individual lawsuits against tobacco firms, which didn’t ultimately succeed, individual lawsuits against Meta have already resulted in verdicts that found Meta liable.

At the same time, it also doesn't set any sort of precedent for other cases. That's certainly another reason to settle (if you think there's even a chance you're going to lose). As is this from the same piece:

However, the agreement includes a provision that it shouldn’t be cited against the company in other cases, noted Eric Goldman, associate dean for research and professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law. That avoids giving plaintiffs in Meta’s other lawsuits a straightforward argument that the company has already acknowledged the allegations against it.

And so Meta walks away with what looks like a poke on the wrist. For now...

¹ Though yes, it came back down after a down day for the market – but still ended the day up $15B. Pretty close to the settlement amount! ↩

² To the US-only point, how much do you want to bet that there will be some VPN workaround? Too complicted for kids? Come on. What about changing the time on the device? You laugh now... ↩

³ But really, how long until the AI companies use a similar playbook? ↩

2026-08-26 22:57:12

Uh, Bill Gates sounds a lot like... Dario Amodei in writing up his thoughts on where he thinks the world is headed with regard to AI. It's a good essay, worth the read, but it's certainly not going to help the AI perception problems! (And it's also worth wondering why he is weighing in right now...)

Also, the Mac mini lives! But not the version you remember. It has been reborn as Apple's AI PC. Read on for thoughts on...

2026-08-25 21:22:54

The streaming wars are over. Netflix won. Actually, YouTube may have won without anyone really realizing it until it was too late thanks largely to the guise of "UGC". Regardless, that battle is over. We've shifted into a new phase. And in a twist that will shock absolutely no one, it's the re-bundling of content after all the streamers worked so hard, and spent billions upon billions to unbundle it.

It's the early days of this new fight, so there's seemingly not much action yet. But I think we saw the opening salvo a few weeks back in the form of YouTube's deal to add Peacock to their Premium offering. To me, that was a shot over the bow of Netflix. A sort of "we're escalating – and not just with UGC".

Of course, Netflix must have seen this coming because it was a long time coming – ever since last year when Netflix teamed up with Spotify around video podcasts to wade into UGC for the first time. Since then, they've kept cutting deals left and right with YouTube talent to bring their content to Netflix. They may not be trying to become YouTube outright – that would be impossible at this point and scale – but they also know they need to play the game on the field, to switch analogies.

Again, YouTube sort of snuck up and stole home field advantage. As such, they now set the rules, by which Netflix must play.

Anyway, it's a game now, but it's about to be a war. And while it's bigger than just Netflix and YouTube, those are also clearly the two main combatants at the moment. Amazon, Apple, Disney and maybe a couple others will try to fight their way in – good luck, guys – but the prize is clear: to be the main UI for all content.

The New York Times wrote up this brewing battle yesterday with a piece by John Koblin entitled, "The Biggest Dogs in Streaming Want You to Use Only Their App". As he writes:

The push underscores the competitive reality for the titans of streaming television. Companies that were once laser-focused on gaining new subscribers are now far more concerned with keeping those people watching as much as possible, and canceling as little as possible. The result is that the streaming wars of a few years ago have morphed into the bundling wars of today. The biggest streaming firms are no longer content to just have the most subscribers. They also want to be the main entry point to everything streaming has to offer.“The thing that matters is that when you turn on the TV, what app are you opening for the next three hours?” said Jonathan Carson, the chief executive of Antenna, a subscription research firm.

Consumers are already showing enthusiasm for using one platform to manage their streaming subscriptions. Over the last three years, subscriptions made via third-party platforms like Amazon, Roku or YouTube have grown roughly 60 percent, according to Antenna. About a third of all new subscriptions are now purchased this way.

Koblin frames Amazon as the "runaway leader" pointing back to his piece on Prime Video 'Channels' from a year ago. And it's true that they were the pioneer and now leader with that strategy – letting you buy other subscriptions through their service. But I also can't help but wonder if they weren't too early here – which wouldn't be the first time for Amazon – and that while the strategy seems sound for now, with many trying to copy it, if the landscape shifts, even if just in subtle ways, it may tilt towards YouTube and Netflix.

Again, I think YouTube's Peacock deal may signal this shift. It's not an upsell, it's included. I still sort of can't believe Comcast agreed to this, but it also speaks to YouTube's power – and Peacock's position in the market. Comcast needed to find a partner and/or a home for their laggard streaming service. And they did.

And that makes the news that Netflix has also been talking to Peacock about potentially bundling their service even more interesting. Here's Koblin:

Netflix executives recently discussed bringing Peacock and Fox One to Netflix’s streaming service with NBCUniversal and the Fox Corporation, the three people with knowledge of the discussions said. They added that there was no imminent deal to be announced, and that it was not yet clear whether Netflix would absorb the content into its own service, as in the YouTube-Peacock deal, or act more as a retailer in the mold of Amazon Prime Video.

But any move in that direction is a departure from what Netflix said just two years ago, when the company told shareholders that it “already operates as a go-to destination for entertainment.”

But actually, this Peacock news isn't new – The Wall Street Journal's Jessica Toonkel and Ben Fritz reported on it almost two months ago. What changed since then is that YouTube/Peacock deal. As I wrote when that news came out:

All of this is clearly not great news for Netflix. Not only were they said to be exploring a Peacock add-on option – which still could happen, again presumably as a "Channel" within Netflix as a way for Comcast to continue to hedge – but the bigger issue is that this seemingly vaults YouTube into pole position as the default UI for streaming.

It felt a bit like the YouTube/Peacock deal was also a way to stop Netflix from striking their own partnership. This new report might suggest that such conversations are still ongoing, or simply that they happened (which, again, we already knew). That was my big question around that news:

The biggest question remains how the actual deal is structured. Beyond direct monetization of their content on YouTube, presumably there's a broader revenue share in place too. The bigger question is if there was some sort of up front, lump-sum payment, or ongoing licensing payments. That feels likely, but we'll see. And if so, that may give some level of exclusivity to YouTube? Maybe Comcast can keep their existing partnerships in place as long as they're more of the aforementioned "Channels" or straightforward bundle variety? Maybe YouTube would even prefer that lest they draw the eye of regulators here. But this type of deep integration may be exclusive to YouTube?

Again, that last bit is key. There's a world in which Peacock keeps doing their 'Channels' distribution deals with others, but the fully integrated approach is exclusive to YouTube. Or even if such a thing isn't in the contract, maybe Comcast decides they're only going to try it with YouTube for now, to see how it goes?

On the surface, it seems like a small distinction: both models allow you to access the other content in the main service. But baking it in, fully integrated and "native" without the need for an up-sell, could be the type of UI/UX that wins the day. First and foremost because all the 'Channels' model really does is shift our endless streaming payments and options to one provider – but you're still going to be paying an insane amount of money if you opt-in to all the options. Sure, it's a better experience than having to manage 20 different streaming services separately, but it's not as nice as what YouTube and Peacock are offering here.

And actually, that deal sounds more akin to the one Netflix struck with TF1. That is, bringing the French cable giant's content natively into Netflix. The end result is apparently pretty great. And working, to the point where TF1 is praising the partnership in their earnings calls.

Last December, as Netflix was still battling to buy Warner Bros, I outlined what I thought was their "grand unification strategy" – basically: how they would eventually take the TF1 model and pair that with baking HBO content into Netflix as a more premium offering to lure others into such partnerships, thus creating the "one UI to rule them all". A "Super App" for streaming, if you will.

Some content fully integrated, some upsold – undoubtedly at a nice discount thanks to the magic of bundle economics.

Well, the Warner deal didn't happen. Still, I noted at the time that even if it fell apart, I suspected Netflix would run the same playbook, but that it would just take longer. And here we are. But again, now YouTube may be on the ground mucking up their strategy, by beating them to it.

And that's why, even if this YouTube/Peacock deal isn't exclusive, I suspect we'll start to see some exclusive deals cut. And yes, undoubtedly some acquisitions. Things like Lionsgate. Maybe AMC. Perhaps eventually Peacock and/or NBCUniversal in an actual acquisition. Both Netflix and YouTube will be looking to bulk up for battle.

Again, Amazon may feel bulked up given their position and first-mover advantage with 'Channels' – not to mention MGM – but I still think the ground is shifting. Maybe sports can propel them, but everyone else is playing there too.

Various parties will start to align (or be aligned) around those perceived to be the likely winners. It's sort of wild that Apple isn't one of them.

Yes, Apple TV – the artist formerly known as Apple TV+ – is good, but small. It really is the HBO of old. That's nice, but also sort of quaint in the world we're headed for. They had their iPod in the form of Apple TV – the box, not the aforementioned streaming service – but it was always at least two times too expensive to win the actual market.¹ That was obvious, yet they seemed disinterested. The box never really graduated from the "hobby" that Steve Jobs introduced (alongside the iPhone) all those years ago.

Perhaps that's because Jobs himself was trying to be the one to "crack" the market. And as he told his biographer shortly before his death, he thought he had. But then he passed away and the project seemed to fade away. And we're all perhaps paying the price – quite literally – right now in the form of a couple dozen different streaming services, hunting and pecking around UIs to find what we want to watch.

Meanwhile, the cheap Roku boxes won the day. And now the FAST services are entering the fray to beam ads back into our eyeballs with a vengeance.² It's depressing. Apple should have been focused on running the old iTunes playbook here, to unify the messy streaming world with a great UI and wonderful consumer experience – and while they seemingly tried, perhaps a few times, it was half-hearted at best. And they let, who else, Netflix block them every step of the way.

The content players needed to learn their lessons the hard way. Not exactly like the music industry before them with piracy, but instead by slowly bleeding out as they spent billions trying to compete with Netflix.³ And here we are. But again, without Apple in a strategic position to do much about it.

And so it falls to Netflix or YouTube to be the UI through which content will flow.

I've been writing about all of this for years and years. And it's playing out almost exactly as I thought it would – both the bleed out and the fact that Netflix and Amazon would be there, circling the battlefield like vultures. What I didn't see until more recently was YouTube's potential role – and again, that Apple wouldn't really have one, as the de facto aggregator, at least.

Of course, they could lunge right back into this race by, say, buying Disney. Look, I'm not even trying to spend Tim Cook's money anymore, it's John Ternus' money now! Maybe he'll have a less tight wallet! There are signs...

Disney, of course, is the other elephant in this particular room. They've been busy bundling too – but mostly with their own content, slowly roping Hulu and now ESPN into Disney+ as their new CEO, Josh D'Amaro, also tries to create that "Super App". But Disney doesn't quite have the purse strings that the other players do here. They have the best content and IP, which is important leverage, but it feels like they're going to eventually be a player to be bundled, not a bundler.

If someone can grab that crown jewel... well, it might be the last Infinity Stone needed to win the war.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. The battles have just begun in these new Bundle Wars. But now we should look for the pieces to increasingly move quickly. Sports rights. Content distribution deals. Cable television partnerships. UGC deals. And potentially some major acquisitions in the Paramount/Warner Bros fall out.

A great bundling after we just un-bundled.

¹ While you might counter that the iPod was also too expensive relative to the market at the time, the difference is how much better it was relative to that market – and yes, iTunes. Again, that's Apple's failure here, ironically, failing to nail hardware + software. ↩

² Roku – which, ironically, started life as a Netflix skunkworks project – is obviously a major player on the 'Channels' side as well, thanks to the aforementioned cheap hardware. But I suspect the Fox acquisition may change that in the long run. Also, it feels like the time of the streaming box is ending with this new war. All new TVs have these services baked into their software. ↩

³ Pretty much everyone but Sony, who smartly opted to partner with Netflix instead. Which has paid off for both sides! ↩

2026-08-24 20:17:08

Why might NVIDIA want to buy – sorry, "hackquire" – part of Perplexity? And why might Fable's growth be stalling for Anthropic? Read on for thoughts on...

2026-08-23 22:42:40

As if a leaked video of the AirPods with Cameras – which I wish they'd call 'EyePods' but I'm guessing they're going to call 'AirPods Pro 4 with Visual Intelligence' – wasn't enough, some leaked code also within the release candidate of macOS Tahoe 26.7 now seems to give away a few more intriguing details about the device. Namely, how the cameras may actually work.

And actually, this leak could be somewhat useful to Apple because the last one – again, the video of them in action – had people concerned that Apple was about to release some surveillance tech for the masses. Which is a nicer way of saying "PervPods", as the internet has so wonderfully coined.

Apple, of course, prides themselves on their reputation with regard to user trust and security. Two traits which Meta, Apple's would-be main competitor in the nascent AI wearable space, decidedly lacks. Was Apple really going to risk throwing away such trust to put some cameras on your ears? This latest leak points to how Apple is clearly trying to get around this issue. As discovered by MacRumors forum member mactracker and summarized by Tim Hardwick, a few key bits:

AirPods support periodic image capture but not video: The cameras take internal still frames for Visual Intelligence to process, rather than "taking pictures" or recording video. In "active" mode, the framework can request a synced pair of images, or it can receive a capture rate, where pairs of stills are continually sent at the specified rate.

I repeat: no video. In my column last week I suspected exactly this scenario. While Apple will downplay the "picture taking" capabilities of such a device, the reality is that they have to capture some sort of image to make their systems work. But video seems a bridge too far, at least for now.

Active and passive capture modes use different resolutions: In "active" mode, likely triggered by the user via Siri, the AirPods capture a 640x640 image and return a processed 1024x1024 image. "That's about 0.4 megapixels of sampled image data, and a little over 1 megapixel for the output frame," mactracker explains. In "passive" mode, they capture a 320x320 image that can return a 320×320 or 512×512 output. "These are capture-specific resolutions, and the physical sensor's native resolution may be larger," adds mactracker.

640x640 is a comically small, low-resolution image. Technically, it's 0.41 megapixels. For comparison, the main camera on the iPhone 17 Pro is 48 megapixels. That's a full two orders of magnitude. Yes, the processing pushes that image to just over one megapixel – a threshold that was state of the art in... 1991.

Interestingly, the "passive" mode cuts such small resolutions in half. Now we're talking early web graphics sizes for images. The kind of images that wouldn't completely clog a 14.4 baud dial-up modem.

In other words, if people intend to use these AirPods as surveillance tech, it's going to be pretty shitty surveillance tech. There are literal kids toys that will take far better images. A Fisher-Price spy cam would do an infinitely better job.

Some processing happens directly on AirPods: The code mentions "peripheral inference," or on-device detection of whether a person is in view.

If true, given the sheer literal size of the AirPods, this would be insanely impressive. But again, those image sizes help! And this will certainly help that privacy narrative if you don't have to send all of those images – even if their comically low resolution state – to your iPhone. Or worse, the cloud.

Each AirPod likely has a capture indicator light: The framework contains code that allows it to remotely control a hardware indicator and its brightness, suggesting the AirPods have a light to let other people know when they are capturing still images.

Yeah, I also assumed this would be the case, as it's sort of the bare-minimum privacy norm if you have any sort of capture capabilities on a wearable. And this points directly to an issue Apple still could have here...

While they'll downplay any talk of "capture" and certainly not frame these as "cameras", the reality remains that – assuming the above capabilities ship – both categorizations are technically true. Apple can and will talk up the low-resolution and on-device work, but some people will still just hear and see wearable cameras here. And while I suspect that society will eventually grow numb to such tech, just as we have with cameras capturing/recording most things thanks to our phones, it's going to take some time.¹

In that regard, perhaps it's good that these newfangled AirPods were apparently delayed until 2027 (despite the leak). Apple can let Meta keep taking the early backlash as the industry still grapples with 'Glasshole' scars.

¹ With the AI element of all this just further exaccerbating the issues... ↩