SOCIAL
Meta: Mark Zuckerberg and top execs spending most of their time on A.I.

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg has taken his eye off the metaverse for the time being and is instead focussing on the topic of the moment: artificial intelligence.
The top team at social media giant Meta sees A.I. contributing to the metaverse in time, but currently, their focus is to deploy the technology to improve their advertising offering.
That’s according to Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, who told Nikkei Asia that the company will commercialize its generative artificial intelligence by December—joining a host of other businesses who deployed A.I. products for real-world use in a frenzied first few months of 2023.
Bosworth said that he, as well as CEO and chairman Zuckerberg and Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, were spending “most” of their time working on a newly-formed A.I. team.
He added: “We feel very confident that we are at the very forefront. Quite a few of the techniques that are in large language model development were pioneered [by] our teams.”
The Reality Labs team leader added Meta had been investing in A.I. for “over a decade” and claims to have “one of the leading research institutes in the world.”
The technology being worked on by the team formed a few months ago can—likeChatGPT—instantly create sentences but also images.
It will be deployed to improve Meta’s advertising offering, with Bosworth—known to staff as ‘Boz’—explaining that instead of a company being pushed to use a single image for a campaign, they can ask the AI to “make images for my company that work for different audiences.”
That will save time and money.
The rollout to make advertising with Meta more attractive will be a lynchpin for the company’s revenue model as a whole.
Advertising is the company’s main revenue stream, having brought in nearly $115 billion in 2021, $112.6 billion in 2023, and estimates of $121.9 billion in 2023 –according to market researchers eMarketer.
Meta against A.I. resistance from Big Tech chiefs
The Facebook and Instagram owner refuses to be deterred by calls to halt progress on developing large language models more intelligent than Chat-GPT4.
Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak recently signed an open letter calling for a ban on further work until regulation parameters can be put in place.
Yet like Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Bosworth isn’t sold on the plan.
His response to the petition, he said, is “no”.
He explained: “I think it’s very important to invest in responsible development and we do that kind of investment all the time. However, it’s very hard to stop progress and make the right decisions on what changes you would make.
“Very often you have to understand how technology evolves before you can know how to protect and make it safe. And so I think, not only is it unrealistic, I don’t think it would be effective.”
His words echo that of Gates, who told Reuters Monday: “Clearly there’s huge benefits to these things…what we need to do is identify the tricky areas.”
Back to the Metaverse
Meta has expressed it wants to tie in its A.I. work with its much-maligned vision for the virtual reality world of the metaverse.
Zuckerberg has been criticized in the past for a blind pursuit to make the digital world a success, despite the dream proving an eye-watering costly endeavor.
Apparently unaffected by the Metaverse bill creeping above $36 billion between 2019 and 2022 alone, Bosworth outlined that A.I. could help develop the landscape within the virtual reality.
“So previously if I wanted to create a 3D world, I needed to learn a lot of computer graphics and programming,” he said.
“In the future, you might be able to just describe the world you want to create and have the large language model generate that world for you. And so it makes things like content creation much more accessible to more people.”
A.I. launches from the likes of Alphabet-owned Google and Microsoft haven’t come off without a hitch, with Google’s Bard flunking questions asked by Fortune, while Microsoft’s Bing told users it “wanted to be alive”.
For Meta, it seems the staff who have avoided being laid off so far have already come up with a way to test the metaverse in a practice known as “dog-fooding”, where employees strap on a Meta VR headset and explore the platform for errors in what is known as a “meta quest”.
SOCIAL
Walmart says it has stopped advertising on Elon Musk’s X platform

Walmart said Friday that it is scaling back its advertising on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, because “we’ve found some other platforms better for reaching our customers.”
Walmart’s decision has been in the works for a while, according to a person familiar with the move. Yet it comes as X faces an advertiser exodus following billionaire owner Elon Musk’s support for an antisemitic post on the platform.
The retailer spends about $2.7 billion on advertising each year, according to MarketingDive. In an email to CBS MoneyWatch, X’s head of operations, Joe Benarroch, said Walmart still has a large presence on X. He added that the company stopped advertising on X in October, “so this is not a recent pausing.”
“Walmart has a wonderful community of more than a million people on X, and with a half a billion people on X, every year the platform experiences 15 billion impressions about the holidays alone with more than 50% of X users doing most or all of their shopping online,” Benarroch said.
Musk struck a defiant pose earlier this week at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit, where he cursed out advertisers that had distanced themselves from X, telling them to “go f— yourself.” He also complained that companies are trying to “blackmail me with advertising” by cutting off their spending with the platform, and cautioned that the loss of big advertisers could “kill” X.
“And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company,” Musk added.
Dozens of advertisers — including players such as Apple, Coca Cola and Disney — have bailed on X since Musk tweeted that a post on the platform that claimed Jews fomented hatred against White people, echoing antisemitic stereotypes, was “the actual truth.”
Advertisers generally shy away from placing their brands and marketing messages next to controversial material, for fear that their image with consumers could get tarnished by incendiary content.
The loss of major advertisers could deprive X of up to $75 million in revenue, according to a New York Times report.
Musk said Wednesday his support of the antisemitic post was “one of the most foolish” he’d ever posted on X.
“I am quite sorry,” he said, adding “I should in retrospect not have replied to that particular post.”
SOCIAL
US Judge Blocks Montana’s Effort to Ban TikTok

TikTok has won another reprieve in the U.S., with a district judge blocking Montana’s effort to ban the app for all users in the state.
Back in May, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed legislation to ban TikTok outright from operating in the state, in order to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by China. There’s no definitive evidence that TikTok is, or has participated in such, but Gianforte opted to move to a full ban, going further than the government device bans issued in other regions.
As explained by Gianforte at the time:
“The Chinese Communist Party using TikTok to spy on Americans, violate their privacy, and collect their personal, private, and sensitive information is well-documented. Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party.”
In response, a collection of TikTok users challenged the proposed ban, arguing that it violated their first amendment rights, which led to this latest court challenge, and District Court Judge Donald Molloy’s decision to stop Montana’s ban effort.
Montana’s TikTok ban had been set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024.
In issuing a preliminary injunction to stop Montana from imposing a full ban on the app, Molloy said that Montana’s legislation does indeed violate the Constitution and “oversteps state power.”
Molloy’s judgment is primarily centered on the fact that Montana has essentially sought to exercise foreign policy authority in enacting a TikTok ban, which is only enforceable by federal authorities. Molloy also noted that there was a “pervasive undertone of anti-Chinese sentiment” within Montana’s proposed legislation.
TikTok has welcomed the ruling, issuing a brief statement in response:
We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok.
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) December 1, 2023
Montana attorney general, meanwhile, has said that it’s considering next steps to advance its proposed TikTok ban.
The news is a win for TikTok, though the Biden Administration is still weighing a full TikTok ban in the U.S., which may still happen, even though the process has been delayed by legal and legislative challenges.
As I’ve noted previously, my sense here would be that TikTok won’t be banned in the U.S. unless there’s a significant shift in U.S.-China relations, and that relationship is always somewhat tense, and volatile to a degree.
If the U.S. government has new reason to be concerned, it may well move to ban the app. But doing so would be a significant step, and would prompt further response from the C.C.P.
Which is why I suspect that the U.S. government won’t act, unless it feels that it has to. And right now, there’s no clear impetus to implement a ban, and stop a Chinese-owned company from operating in the region, purely because of its origin.
Which is the real crux of the issue here. A TikTok ban is not just banning a social media company, it’s blocking cross-border commerce, because the company is owned by China, which will remain the logic unless clear evidence arises that TikTok has been used as a vector for gathering information on U.S. citizens.
Banning a Chinese-owned app because it is Chinese-owned is a statement, beyond concerns about a social app, and the U.S. is right to tread carefully in considering how such a move might impact other industries.
So right now, TikTok is not going to be banned, in Montana, or anywhere else in the U.S. But that could still change, very quickly.
SOCIAL
EU wants to know how Meta tackles child sex abuse

The investigation is the first step in procedures launched under the EU’s new online content law known as the Digital Services Act – Copyright AFP Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV
The EU on Friday demanded Instagram-owner Meta provide more information about measures taken by the company to address child sexual abuse online.
The request for information focuses on Meta’s risk assessment and mitigation measures “linked to the protection of minors, including regarding the circulation of self-generated child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM) on Instagram”, the European Commission said.
Meta must also give information about “Instagram’s recommender system and amplification of potentially harmful content”, it added.
The investigation is the first step in procedures launched under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), but does not itself constitute an indication of legal violations or a move towards punishment.
Meta must respond by December 22.
A report by Stanford University and the Wall Street Journal in June this year said Instagram is the main platform used by paedophile networks to promote and sell content showing child sexual abuse.
Meta at the time said it worked “aggressively” to fight child exploitation.
The commission has already started a series of investigations against large digital platforms seeking information about how they are complying with the DSA.
It has sought more information from Meta in October about the spread of disinformation as well as a request for information last month about how the company protects children online.
The DSA is part of the European Union’s powerful regulatory armoury to bring big tech to heel, and requires digital giants take more aggressive action to counter the spread of illegal and harmful content as well as disinformation.
Platforms face fines that can go up to six percent of global turnover for violations.
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