Meta and Google plan to make generative A.I. an inescapable part of your life

According to a Financial Times article, Meta will start sticking A.I. “personas” into Facebook and Instagram, maybe as soon as next month. The aim is apparently for these chatbots, which will have different styles of speaking, to provide search functionality and generally increase engagement on Meta’s platforms, with the company obviously getting the added benefit of learning a great deal more about its users via their interactions with these bots.

Given that European courts and regulators have shut down Meta’s ability to legally track people’s activities across multiple services and websites without express user consent, any new method of targeting advertising would prove very welcome at 1 Hacker Way.

Meanwhile, Axios reports that Google has begun work on a revamped version of Assistant, to smarten it up with generative A.I.

“As a team, we need to focus on delivering high-quality, critical product experiences for our users,” VP Peeyush Ranjan and product chief Duke Dukellis wrote in an internal email. “We’ve also seen the profound potential of generative A.I. to transform people’s lives and see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest [large language model] technology, would look like. (A portion of the team has already started working on this, beginning with mobile.)”

This involves a reorganization, with some jobs going away as Google combines its Services and Surfaces teams (the latter of which deals with various interfaces such as Google Home speakers and Android Auto). Amazon is also working on A.I.-izing its Alexa virtual assistant, and Apple is quietly trying to figure out how to do the same with Siri.

Soon, there will be no escape. The big question is how trustworthy these assistants will be, in terms of both the quality of the information they will provide—generative A.I. tends to “hallucinate” misleading nonsense some of the time—and their discretion.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Big Tech has a terrible privacy record and no way of pushing back against U.S. intelligence demands, and the ideal virtual assistant is one that’s auditable and on-device rather than being dependent on centralized cloud services, allowing it to be a trustworthy confidant.

Separately, check out my colleague Kylie Robison’s article on Bluesky’s first big test. Some users were signing up with racial slurs in their usernames, and a couple of the Twitter clone’s investors were unhappy with CEO Jay Graber for not speaking up. There were two big problems here—moderation is hard as a platform scales up, but there was also Graber’s failure to properly apologize for the racist-handle issue. After a lot of pressure, she apologized to the community for Bluesky’s moderation failures, but also for the team’s extended silence about them.

As Kylie writes:

Part of the challenge facing Graber and Bluesky is that they are working on two tech projects simultaneously: the user-facing app as well as an underlying protocol designed to establish an open-source framework for creating social apps by other developers. Graber and the team have not been shy to reiterate that the protocol is their vision for solving the issues that plague centralized social media companies.

On which note, I’ve just joined Bluesky myself. I’m frankly feeling quite fatigued by social media at the moment—thanks to the deeply unproductive Twitter/X drama and the fact that my Facebook feed is seemingly 80% sponsored content these days—but I’ll try to maintain a presence on Bluesky, at least for a while. My profile is here if you care to follow me.

More news below.

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David Meyer

NEWSWORTHY

Uber profitable. For the first time in 14 years, Uber has reported an operating profit. The ride-hailing and delivery firm posted a $394 million profit for the last quarter. The Wall Street Journal reports that analysts were expecting an $18 million loss, which would itself have been a vast improvement on the $2.6 billion loss a year before. Uber is also now looking for a new CFO, as Nelson Chai will leave in January.

Terraform fraud ruling. Terraform Labs and founder Do Kwon have lost their bid to dismiss fraud allegations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, relating to the collapse of their TerraUSD and Luna tokens. As Reuters reports, the SEC accuses Kwon and his outfit of misleading investors about TerraUSD’s stability.

NATO’s startup fund. The NATO defense alliance has closed a $1 billion fund that will invest directly in startups that are “responsible and led by fundamental principles: safety, freedom, and human empowerment.” Per TechCrunch, the NATO Innovation Fund is a bit like the U.S.’s In-Q-Tel (which has invested in the likes of Palantir and FireEye) and will focus on areas such as A.I., quantum computing, space tech, and energy.

ON OUR FEED

“Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research, in the desperate hope that he can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers.”

—Imran Ahmed, head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, responds to a legal threat from Twitter/X over the NGO’s highlighting of hate speech on the platform. Musk accused the group of trying to harm its digital ad business.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Elon Musk refuses to cede control over Twitter’s flashpoint content moderation team to his new CEO, by Christiaan Hetzner

Telecoms giant BT appoints first female CEO in its history. Her priority will be clearing out almost 55,000 staff, by Prarthana Prakash

Tech worker goes viral after listing all past and current salaries on LinkedIn—but experts warn that may work against you, by Orianna Rosa Royle

Neuroscientist who studies how the brain learns information explains why A.I. would be the ‘perfect psychopath’ in an executive role, by The Conversation

Over 75% of investors are hyped about tech stocks because of A.I.—but less than half of them would pay to use it for personal or business reasons, by Bloomberg

Lawyers for tech consultant accused of killing Cash App founder Bob Lee say he had no motive for murder: ‘What you see is a cordial relationship’, by Associated Press

BEFORE YOU GO

Repairability ahoy. Microsoft is now selling parts for its Xbox controllers, including input circuit boards, top cases, and buttons. It’s selling them directly and through iFixit, giving users a cheaper and more sustainable option than just buying a new unit when something goes wrong with the old one.

As The Verge notes, this appears to be more fruit from Microsoft’s repairability agreement a couple years back with shareholder advocacy group As You Sow—and it’s part of a wider industry exploration of the concept.