All posts tagged: Metas

Meta’s New AI Pendant : Features, Privacy Risks and Release Date

Meta’s New AI Pendant : Features, Privacy Risks and Release Date

Published by skeptic

Meta has introduced an AI-powered pendant designed to passively capture and process audio from conversations, meetings and other interactions. The device uses natural language processing (NLP) to transcribe recordings, summarize key points and connect the data with calendars and emails. According to AI Grid, the pendant incorporates technology from Limitless, a startup previously acquired by Meta, highlighting how the company is integrating earlier developments into its expanding hardware lineup. Explore how the pendant connects audio data to existing workflows, the privacy measures Meta must address and the regulatory challenges it faces in different regions. Gain insight into the device’s role within Meta’s broader strategy for AI-driven hardware and its potential impact on everyday organization. This overview examines both the practical applications and the complexities surrounding this new wearable. What Sets the AI Pendant Apart? TL;DR Key Takeaways : Meta is developing an AI-powered wearable pendant that passively records audio, transcribes conversations and integrates with user data to enhance productivity. The device builds on technology from Limitless, a startup acquired by Meta and represents a shift …

Meta’s AI support agent bound recovery emails for anyone who asked. Your SOC never saw an alert.

Meta’s AI support agent bound recovery emails for anyone who asked. Your SOC never saw an alert.

Published by skeptic

Meta’s AI support agent bound recovery emails to accounts for whoever asked, and SOCs never saw an alert. An authorized agent writes a log of legitimate transactions, so nothing in the detection stack fired. Attackers asked the bot to make the change, took the one-time code it sent, and ran the password reset, 404 Media reported. No malware, no stolen credentials, and no prompt injection in the sense most security teams drill for. The agent did exactly what Meta built it to do. That is what should keep a security operations leader up at night: The takeover did not break a control; it rode one that was already trusted. What a SOC needs is a way to walk each recovery path through an audit grid with its AI build team before the next renewal closes. The AI Authority Audit Grid at the end of this article maps every authentication write a support agent can make on the recovery path, what Meta’s incident proved about each one, why it stays dark to the SOC, and the …

Meta’s AI agent for WhatsApp Business is now available globally

Meta’s AI agent for WhatsApp Business is now available globally

Published by skeptic

For years, WhatsApp has been a communication layer for businesses of all sizes around the world. Meta is now infusing AI into that layer in a bid to turn WhatsApp into a viable piece of workflow software for small and medium businesses. The company on Wednesday said it is making its customer support AI bot, now known as Meta Business Agent, available globally within WhatsApp. The launch comes as Meta has spent nearly two years testing AI agents in WhatsApp Business for customer support in countries like India and Mexico. Image Credits: MetaImage Credits:Meta Meta said the AI agent can answer customer questions, recommend products, book appointments, qualify sales leads, and reroute queries to a person if needed. The company is also making the bot available within Instagram DMs. Meta said it is testing a way for the Business Agent to provide daily briefings of chats that occurred overnight, and provide insights. The company is testing this feature with select accounts on WhatsApp Business, Instagram Pro, Messenger and Meta Business Suite. The company said it’s …

‘We’re Just Getting the Crumbs Here’: Striking Contractors Protest Layoffs at Meta’s European Headquarters

‘We’re Just Getting the Crumbs Here’: Striking Contractors Protest Layoffs at Meta’s European Headquarters

Published by skeptic

“We trained the bots. We did the grind. Now we’re being left behind,” chanted a horde of contract workers who gathered outside Meta’s offices in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday afternoon. Waving flags, brandishing signs, and armed with whistles and vuvuzelas, they were out to protest a round of planned layoffs. The workers are employed by Dublin-based company Covalen, which handles content moderation and data labeling services that help Meta to fine-tune its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing “reduced demand,” WIRED reported. A large swath of the affected workers won’t receive any severance because they’ve been employed for less than two years. The rest are being offered the minimum payout required under local labor laws—two weeks’ pay for every year of employment—according to the Communications Workers’ Union (CWU), whose members include Covalen employees. “We’re just getting the crumbs here,” Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planned layoffs, tells WIRED. “Give us a little bit of the pie.” Photograph: Joel Khalili …

Forum Is Meta’s Dedicated App for Bringing Your Facebook Groups Together in One Feed

Forum Is Meta’s Dedicated App for Bringing Your Facebook Groups Together in One Feed

Published by skeptic

“Built for the groups you already love.” That’s what Meta is promising with Forum, a new app from the company, which it quietly launched on Friday. Only available on iPhones for now, the app brings together all of your Facebook groups into a single feed. It works like this: Assuming you belong to several Facebook groups, Forum brings together posts from those groups, surfacing them in your feed without any algorithmic recommendations or posts from friends. If you make a post to a group in your Forum feed, that post will appear in that group feed, and vice versa. The app also has an AI feature called Ask, accessed by a button to the right of the home page button at the horizontal menu at bottom. With Ask, you can search for something across all your groups instead of having to scroll around each one to find it. “Your feed is built around conversations from groups,” said Meta in the App Store listing. “See what real people are saying, not just what’s trending, and easily jump …

Inside Anduril and Meta’s quest to make smart glasses for warfare

Inside Anduril and Meta’s quest to make smart glasses for warfare

Published by skeptic

Anduril actually has two such projects in the works. The first is the Army’s Soldier Born Mission Command, or SBMC, for which the company won a $159 million prototyping contract last year to work with Meta on augmented-reality glasses to attach to existing military helmets. But Anduril has also embarked on a self-funded side quest, announced in October, to design its own helmet and headset combo called EagleEye. This is something the military has not asked for, but Anduril insists it will prefer it and purchase it in the end. So far, both systems are years away. The Army isn’t expected to move its top choice for the SBMC program into production until 2028, if it picks one at all (the previous lead for the effort, Microsoft, was set to receive a $22 billion production contract that was ultimately cancelled when the glasses didn’t prove viable). But Barnett told MIT Technology Review about where both Anduril’s prototypes are headed. Depending on the situation, the glasses for either prototype will overlay certain information onto a soldier’s …

Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

Published by skeptic

As Meta employees brace for layoffs next Wednesday, May 20, many say the vibes are horrifically, historically low. “Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives,” says an employee who works on Instagram. The social media giant plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce, or nearly 8,000 people, “to run the company more efficiently” and “offset the other investments” it’s making, according to a human resources leader. But the layoffs, which will add to the roughly 25,000 cuts Meta has announced over the past four years, are far from the only cause of rock-bottom morale. Widening pay gaps among employees, courtroom losses for the company, and mandatory role changes for hundreds of top engineers have also contributed to what employees view as a uniquely grim atmosphere inside Meta. Yet another issue has been the recent installation of corporate software on employees’ computers to track their activity solely in the name of training AI, according to 16 current and former employees from a variety of roles who spoke with …

Who decides what AI tells you? Campbell Brown, once Meta’s news chief, has thoughts

Who decides what AI tells you? Campbell Brown, once Meta’s news chief, has thoughts

Published by skeptic

Campbell Brown has spent her career chasing accurate information, first as a renowned TV journalist, then as Facebook’s first, and only, dedicated news chief. Now, watching AI reshape how people consume information, she sees history threatening to repeat itself. This time, she’s not waiting for someone else to fix it. Her company, Forum AI — which she discussed recently with TechCrunch’s Tim Fernholz at a StrictlyVC evening in San Francisco — evaluates how foundation models perform on what she calls “high-stakes topics” — geopolitics, mental health, finance, hiring — subjects where “there are no clear yes-or-no answers, where it’s murky and nuanced and complex.” The idea is to find the world’s foremost experts, have them architect benchmarks, then train AI judges to evaluate models at scale. For Forum AI’s geopolitics work, Brown has recruited Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Anne Neuberger, who led cybersecurity in the Obama administration. The goal is to get AI judges to roughly 90% consensus with those human experts, a …

Instagram Introduces Instants, Meta’s New Private Photo Sharing App

Instagram Introduces Instants, Meta’s New Private Photo Sharing App

Published by skeptic

Instagram has a new app called Instants that lets you share unedited photos with your closest friends that’ll disappear once viewed. Sound familiar? Meta announced Instants on Wednesday, an Instagram-integrated tool that lets you photo dump to your mutual followers and friends. Instants won’t let you edit the photos you send, but you can add captions if you’d like.  If this feature sounds familiar, it’s because you can already send private disappearing photos through apps like Snapchat and BeReal. Similar to those apps, photos sent through Instants will vanish after 24 hours. The app also has an undo button in case you second-guess sharing a pic. The Instant app lets you share unedited photos with your closest friends. Jeffrey Hazelwood/ CNET To use Instants, all you need to do is open your Instagram inbox. You’ll see what appears to be a stack of photos in the bottom-right corner of your screen. From there, choose who you want to send images to — close friends or followers you follow back — and tap the white button below …