Cracks are emerging in the AI spending boom
Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but mounting debt, negative cash flow, and growing investor skepticism are raising questions about the sustainability of the AI spending boom.
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Oct 30
Meta quietly launches an AI fashion app called Style Sketch
The app connects to Instagram to build a virtual closet from photos you’ve already shared, or lets you add items manually by snapping a photo, recording a quick video, or uploading images from your camera roll.
Oct 29
Anthropic is asking Wall Street to believe in AGI
Today on Decoder, I’m joined by Joey Brookhart, an analyst at the chip and AI research firm SemiAnalysis, to help me dig into the story inside the numbers of the Anthropic IPO filing — a document known as an S-1.
We urgently need to monitor AI agents’ actions in real time
This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website.
Adam Mosseri says negativity around AI is ‘going to get worse’
Asked about AI and the trend of college students booing tech CEOs at graduation ceremonies, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged in an interview that a lot of people really don't like AI, and it's not just young people and creatives.
Meta says it’ll probably delay its controversial new business terms again
Meta says it may push the implementation of its new business terms past November 20th as it faces backlash from publishers over concerns about AI training. In a post on X, Meta communications head Andy Stone said the company does "not plan to make policy changes without a full consultation with industry groups and leaders."
AI execs may be too out of touch to build for the general public
Tech leaders are flaunting how out of touch they are when they brag about using AI to connect with their families.
Oct 28
Meta quietly launched an ‘AI pet journal’ app
Meta has launched a "tamagotchi-style" pet game called Waddle World, with virtual creatures that chat with users and create doodles to illustrate conversations. According to its Apple and Play Store listings, the "16-bit pet care game" is not really a game, but "a daily journal disguised as a pet."
VisionQuest is what happens when AI really goes rogue
In Marvel's VisionQuest, a superpowered robot tries to better understand humanity by getting lost in elaborate, digital daydreams in which he and other artificial intelligence-powered beings live together in a home.
Oct 27
Meta AI director Rohit Patel leaves to take on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace
Rohit Patel is departing Meta after eight years working on AI evaluations and reinforcement learning, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. His startup, Ndoc, aims to take on Microsoft Office Suite.
Meta gets $3 billion from Nvidia and plans to spend more on Nvidia chips
ia is buying into its customer Meta, which plans to run more of its AI agents on Nvidia hardware.
Anthropic opens its books for Wall Street, showing record revenue and mounting obligations
Anthropic is the first major AI lab to file an S-1 with the SEC, planning to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT." The numbers are strong, with $11.6 billion in quarterly revenue, a first-ever operating profit, and existing customers spending nine times more year over year. But the company also carries roughly $800 billion in long-term compute commitments.
The RealReal won’t let AI agents hog designer clothing
The RealReal, a secondhand luxury fashion consignment retailer, said it's updating its bot defense system, effectively making it harder for AI agents to shop on its site. The change comes days after The Verge reported that an AI agent could be used to take advantage of The RealReal's item reserve system.
Oct 26
Meta plans up to $95 billion in stock sales to fund its AI buildout
Meta plans to sell new stock to raise money for its AI infrastructure buildout.
The focus on AI safety disasters ignores everyday harms
Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will not encourage suicide. A social media platform makes it more difficult for children to buy fentanyl. These are important protections, and they should have existed all along.
Oct 25
The hottest AI wearables and gadgets you should know about
We compiled a list of all the hottest AI wearables, including Muse Charm, Bee, Friend, Plaud, and more.
Oct 23
Meta delays new business terms after publisher pushback on AI scraping
Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company.
Meta turns Muse sharing back on
Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application.
Meta’s AI could still scrape news sites, legal experts say
Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns.
In Meta’s version of the future, I’ll have my Muse call your Muse
Mark Zuckerberg is barrelling toward a future in which an autonomous network of AI agents will run our lives - shopping for us, working for us, talking to other people's AI agents for us. Are humans ready for this very specific and unrelenting vision of a life in which we communicate primarily through bot proxies?
Meta wants to pay for its broad AI buildout with a newly created class of stock
The social media giant is planning a new stock strategy to help power its broad investments in AI models and services.
Oct 22
Spotify’s current AI bet is about being the music service that agents choose
Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström explains why the rise of AI agents could be good news for the music service.
AI agents are ready to shop. Some retailers are wary
Using an AI agent to shop for you is a strange experience. Tech companies have marketed them as personal assistants - the democratizing of labor that ordinarily would only be available to the rich and powerful.
Meta to create a new class of shares to fund AI push
Meta says it's issuing a new class of shares to fund its AI initiatives. As part of its third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, the company says the non-voting stock will also go toward potential acquisitions and employee compensation, with trading beginning in 2027.
While Amazon blocks AI agents, Walmart rolls out the welcome mat
As Amazon blocks AI agents from shopping on its site, Walmart is taking the opposite approach, introducing new technology that lets AI agents make purchases on customers' behalf, with controls over spending and transaction approvals.
Meta says Muse has over 10M users, with shopping a top activity
Meta Muse users are adopting the app for shopping and personal productivity, the company said during its Q3 earnings call. The AI app now has over 10M users.
Oct 21
Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash
Meta changes AI scraping policy but won’t add language respecting robots.txt.
Google has joined Amazon in attacking Nvidia’s stronghold with AI app developers
Google has joined Amazon in releasing a developer tool that makes it easy for PyTorch users to move their apps off Nvidia GPUs.
Sam Altman reportedly pitched three endgames for AI safety, one involving a single firm melting everyone else's GPUs
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out three paths to safe AI in an internal presentation: an international watchdog modeled after the IAEA, a merger of the major labs into one entity, or a single company so powerful it could shut down everyone else's compute. He called the last option "terrible."
Meta tries to scapegoat staff who downloaded torrents to spare execs
Meta argues nobody “decided” to pirate books to train AI.
Meta pauses Muse sharing after researchers find AI chats on the web
Meta says it paused a Muse feature that lets you share conversations with the AI assistant after researchers found the URLs publicly available on the web, as reported by Ars Technica. In a report published this week, researchers at the security firm Claroc say they found more than 6,800 Muse links through public DNS records.
Meta’s Muse hits 10M US downloads in 40 days, a milestone reached by only 11 other apps
New data also shows Muse is retaining users at higher rates than its AI rivals.
Oct 20
Meta Muse exposes users' personal and business secrets when they share conversations
Meta is suspending the sharing feature while it investigates its privacy.
[AINews] not much happened today
Congrats to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, MiniMax M3.1 Flash, and Mercury 3 (details below) but they’re not going to be in super wide use just yet.
Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people.
Oct 19
Stripe says AI agent purchases are adding up, but it won't share the numbers
AI agents are increasingly using Stripe's payment service Link to shop for their users, Upstarts Media reports.
Oct 18
Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns
A Meta spokesperson insisted that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web.
Oct 17
Meta removes language that may have allowed it to scrape news sites
After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI.
Websites are closing their doors to AI agents
Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice?
[AINews] High Taste Testers Ep. 1
We are piloting a new show on Latent Space: High Taste Testers, a variant of our food show where we pull you in to a typical lunch conversation in San Francisco. All your favorite talking points, starting with Dev Day and going into the latest models and assistants, are here: Let us know your feedback!