Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s internal announcement on Friday about a “large” companywide AI hackathon next month quickly sparked frustration and disbelief among employees. In internal messages seen by WIRED, some workers wrote that added responsibilities in the wake of recent mass layoffs at the tech giant had left them with little time to join such … Read more
Someone interrupted a livestreamed, employee-only presentation at Meta earlier this week with an expletive-filled outburst about “being the company’s bitch,” according to a recording heard by WIRED. The individual then asked the people leading the call to write to a specific Meta AI executive and “tell him that he’s a piece of shit.” One of … Read more
Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a celebrated, venerated national security journalist. You are. You have covered national security for a long time and you have covered, for lack of a better word, real spy stuff. You’ve been deep in it. How does that compare to this in terms of source handling in terms of the … Read more
A former Meta employee who lost their job during a round of layoffs on May 20 is said to have been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in recent days, according to communications inside the company seen by WIRED. A current employee posted about the incident on an internal Meta messaging board for immigration … Read more
Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. “We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much … Read more
One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code. The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips … Read more
On Monday, SpaceX amended its initial public offering to state that water conditions—including water scarcity, regulations around water, and drought—could constrain data center development. It isn’t the only tech company trying to assess how water scarcity might impact its business. Water use is emerging as one of the most contentious data center issues. A recent … Read more
Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company’s software. Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when … Read more