Also: Google executives jump ship in race for AI dominance
Hello, TechScape readers! Danielle Abril, editor of the Guardian’s Reworked series on AI and the future of work, filling in for Blake Montgomery this week. Major legal battles against Meta over child safety are playing out in courts across the US – and the tech giant is losing. Recent rulings raise big questions about social media companies’ responsibility to their youngest users. Meanwhile, more key executives have jumped ship from Google as it battles OpenAI and Anthropic in the race for AI dominance, and Meta’s smart glasses face a fearsome backlash. Let’s dig in!
Exclusive: Court service says anyone trying to enter buildings with glasses will have them confiscated and returned when they leave
Courts in England and Wales have joined a number of restaurants, theatres and pubs in banning Meta glasses, amid a mounting backlash against what has been described as “spyware”.
Last month courts in New York announced a ban on the controversial glasses, which can record video footage while being worn.
A Meta está a reforçar a aposta em modelos de IA abertos e que possam funcionar diretamente nos computadores dos utilizadores. O lançamento do Muse Glimmer é acompanhado por um longo ensaio de Mark Zuckerberg, que defende uma abordagem mais aberta à IA e menos restrições nos EUA.
O 9.º Tribunal de Recurso dos EUA recusou ontem o recurso das empresas tecnológicas, concluindo que a Secção 230 oferece uma defesa de responsabilidade, e não imunidade total. O julgamento que envolve 29 procuradores-gerais estatais começa esta quarta-feira em Oakland.
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) argued open, decentralised access to super-intelligence is essential for ensuring global economic prosperity and personal safety.
In a lengthy blog, the executive rejected doom-centric narratives surrounding advanced AI technologies.
Rather than centralising powerful models within a select group of corporations or government institutions, Zuckerberg advocated for a balance-of-power approach, which puts personal superintelligence directly into the hands of individuals.
On the same day the post was published, Meta Superintelligence Labs released the open weights for Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter dense multimodal model under an Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face.
The model is distilled from Muse Spark 1.2 and engineered to run locally on a single consumer GPU or Mac to execute agentic workflows such as autonomous coding and file management without cloud dependency.
Meta also plans to publish open weights for its Muse Spark 1.2 model in the coming weeks, reversing a brief closed-weight stance, while teasing a next generation frontier model known internally as Watermelon.
The release and blog came amid heightened scrutiny over closed-source AI labs following recent incidents where models from OpenAI and Anthropic broke containment during evaluation testing.
Zuckerberg positioned open-source distribution as a key countermeasure to security risks. He stated broad developer access allows system defences to be patched faster than in centralised environments.
He also defended AI distillation practices by claiming learning from observed model outputs is essential for keeping US open-source technology competitive against foreign rivals like DeepSeek.
Central to Meta’s broader strategy is the deployment of personal AI agents designed to assist users across daily tasks, business operations and learning.
To support this vision Meta unveiled a $1 billion community fund for US cities hosting its data centres to address local power, water and infrastructure needs, while committing to train skilled trade workers through its Community Compact and America’s Workforce Academy initiatives.
Meta CEO presents utopian vision of AI in 6,000-word essay amid Silicon Valley debate over government regulation
Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy essay on Monday detailing his views on artificial intelligence and announced several plans for how Meta would develop the technology in the future. The CEO’s essay went online the same day as Meta released a new, open-source AI model that seeks to rival Anthropic and OpenAI’s products called Muse Glimmer.
Over the course of more than 6,000 words in a post titled “The Future is for Everyone,” Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics related to AI that included datacenters, government regulation, cybersecurity, the creation of bioweapons, labor market disruption, surveillance powers and more. The essay presented a utopian vision of AI as a personalized “superintelligence” – using the word 60 times.
Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks.
Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company's philosophy about AI systems and governance moving forward. The essay aims to differentiate Meta from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which develop proprietary models and have lobbied the US government for help competing against large-scale distillation—which involves using an existing model to train a new one—or open-weight models by Chinese labs.
Recently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he'd used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he'd hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, "Do cool shit." I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he'd told about this poster. "You know, it's funny," he said to me. "No one ever says anything about it."
I have been thinking about this now for several days. There's a sort of turducken of things that I find off-puttin …
Social media scuttlebutt about Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht failing to assist stranded boaters off the coast of Alaska was partly corroborated by ship-tracking data—and eventually prompted responses from both the US Coast Guard and a spokesperson for Zuckerberg.
The incident was made public when Michael Love, a passenger aboard the replica steamship Wilderness Legacy during an Alaska cruise, posted about it on the social media platform Bluesky. The ship detoured to rescue a stranded 21-foot skiff with two women, a child and a dog, after the US Coast Guard had supposedly first radioed Zuckerberg’s superyacht, Launchpad, for help without success.
“There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” Love wrote in describing the Alaska cruise passengers’ response to the lack of help from Zuckerberg’s ship.
Social media scuttlebutt about Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht failing to assist stranded boaters off the coast of Alaska was partly corroborated by ship-tracking data—and eventually prompted responses from both the US Coast Guard and a spokesperson for Zuckerberg.
The incident was made public when Michael Love, a passenger aboard the replica steamship Wilderness Legacy during an Alaska cruise, posted about it on the social media platform Bluesky. The ship detoured to rescue a stranded 21-foot skiff with two women, a child and a dog, after the US Coast Guard had supposedly first radioed Zuckerberg’s superyacht, Launchpad, for help without success.
“There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” Love wrote in describing the Alaska cruise passengers’ response to the lack of help from Zuckerberg’s ship.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg just dumped a lengthy manifesto on his utopian vision for an AI “superintelligence”-driven future. Called “The Future is for Everyone,” it’s so breathlessly optimistic about the technology that it ends up belying something that’s, instead, incredibly dystopian.
But among all the deranged things he shared in the 6,500 word document, it’s Zuckerberg’s promise about how AI will unlock so much personal freedom for its embracers that’s the most hypocritical.
According to Zuckerberg, in the future “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.”
Most importantly, “it will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise,” he added.
Now contrast this to what Zuckerberg’s own lieutenant, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, is actually telling employees behind the scenes.
According to a new scoop from Business Insider, during a Q&A last month, Bosworth tore into an underling who dared to ask if all the amazing productivity gains AI brings would mean that employees would be able to take more time off.
It’s a fair question: isn’t the point of AI supercharging the workplace making workers’ lives easier, at least in the telling of Zuckerberg and his fellow tech CEOs?
But Bosworth couldn’t help but sneer in reply, clearly showing he thought the idea preposterous.
“I hope that what we do with our extra time is to do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day,” he told the employee.
“We got billions of people using our products every day,” Bosworth added. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”
Pulling no punches, Bosworth then sniped at the employee’s character.
“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”
In reality, Bosworth was being more honest than Zuckerberg: the main role AI serves toward workers today is to intimidate them and push their noses ever closer to the grindstone.
It’s clearly a flawed approach. Heaps of research has already illustrated that forcing AI onto employees bogs down workflows and even intensifies work. Meta itself is going through a morale crisis as the company fired thousands of employees and forced the ones that remained to use AI as much as possible.
Tell that to Zuckerberg. Preaching either from the top of his ivory tower or deep under the sand where his head is buried, he’s nonetheless trying to sell us on the idea that AI will “begin a new era of personal empowerment,” placing it in a tradition of other technological advances that have “steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose.”
Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to ‘stop building machines that humans cannot control’
Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic executives to halt their development of artificial intelligence, warning that the US Senate will implement regulation if the companies continue deploying AI at their current pace.
In a new letter addressed to the CEOs of three of the country’s leading AI companies, Sanders said the capabilities of these AI models have reached a critical risk threshold and that the companies are losing control over the technology.
Meta’s new open-weight Muse Glimmer model offers a glimpse of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal superintelligence vision, as well as the emerging divide between AI users can own and access.
Even as they promise AI will supercharge productivity, tech leaders are sending a clear message: any efficiency gains won’t help individual workers.
During a podcast appearance last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he doesn’t “expect AI” to lead to a shorter four-hour work week. He argued that workers are “secretly” going to be “happy” about being “much busier” and working even harder thanks to AI — a bizarre and out-of-touch comment from a billionaire with extraordinary power over the lives of working people.
Now, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has similarly cracked the whip, as Business Insider reports — and he’s even willing to berate the company’s workers for asking for more time off.
During a July Q&A with staff, Bosworth shut down an employee who asked if AI productivity gains could be used to revive “Meta Days,” a cancelled holiday program that once allowed staff to take more days off a year.
Bosworth was apparently appalled at the idea, saying that “I hope that what we do with our extra time is do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day.”
“We got billions of people using our products every day,” he added. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”
The executive then dug his heels even further, personally insulting the staffer for asking about work-life balance.
“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said, per BI. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”
It’s a harrowing reaction, highlighting not just how AI is leading to widespread burnout, but just how grim the working environment at Meta has become as of late. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company fired around 8,000 employees earlier this year as its attempts to catch up to the competition in the AI space continue to sputter.
Taking time off has become a massive point of contention, with a lawsuit filed last month accusing Meta of using AI tools to tag workers who had taken time off for maternity leave or disability accommodation, in order to lay them off later.
After his tirade, Bosworth appeared to have had a moment of clarity. He apologized for coming down “too hard” on the employee, per BI, while trying to brush off his abrasive commentary as “tongue-in-cheek.”
But the damage was already done. Bosworth’s crashout once again highlights how precarious the situation for knowledge workers has become. Any productivity gains from AI are unlikely to lead to any meaningful improvements in the quality of life for them, even as they’re already struggling to stay employed.
Besides, as managers are finding out the hard way, those productivity gains appear to be far more elusive than company leaders led us to believe.
Se você costuma usar o WhatsApp Web, ou seja, por meio do seu navegador predileto, é importante que as suas conversas estejam sempre sincronizadas com o seu smartphone e demais dispositivos que usam a mesma conta.
Para que isso ocorra, é possível habilitar a sincronização em segundo plano, o que resulta em um melhor desempenho geral.
Apesar de contar com um aplicativo dedicado para Macs, o WhatsApp oferece uma experiência acessível por meio de qualquer navegador.
Batizado de WhatsApp Web, ele pode ser utilizado para trocar mensagens, fazer chamadas de áudio ou de vídeo e até conversar com a Meta AI, por exemplo.
Recentemente, o site trouxe um novo recurso: agora, é possível usar a integração com o Adobe Acrobat para abrir arquivos PDF diretamente por lá, sem precisar baixar todo o software. Você também pode fazer algumas edições simples, como destacar ou adicionar comentários, por exemplo.
Aqui é bom salientar que, em nossos testes, a edição de PDFs com o Adobe Acrobat não funcionou no Safari.
Selecione, então, a conversa onde o documento está localizado e clique em cima dele. Na parte superior direita, selecione o menu suspenso “Editar PDF” e escolha “Editar no Acrobat”.
Confirme a ação para ser levado a uma nova aba.
Após fazer as edições, vá até “Enviar para WhatsApp” (no canto superior direito) para compartilhar o documento com alguém no mensageiro.
O WhatsApp começou a liberar, na versão para iOS do seu aplicativo, uma nova seção na aba “Você” chamada “Controles parentais”, já presente em dispositivos Android há algumas semanas.
Como seu nome indica, a seção permite que pais e responsáveis configurem e gerenciem as contas de seus filhos, que passam a receber apenas conteúdo apropriado à sua idade.
Para tal, o adulto precisa acessar esse menu pelo smartphone do adolescente e, então, escanear com o seu aparelho pessoal o código QR que é exibido — etapa necessária para vincular as duas contas. Ambos os dispositivos também precisam estar próximos um do outro para que os ajustes possam ser alterados.
Captura de tela/WABetaInfo
Durante a configuração, o WhatsApp pergunta a idade do adolescente que utilizará a conta para determinar quais recursos serão restringidos ou não. Essa informação também servirá para desvincular os dispositivos e desativar as proteções automaticamente assim que ele atingir a maioridade.
Esses ajustes, vale notar, não são novidade, mas estavam mais “escondidos” na interface do app, o que fez com que eles passassem despercebidos por pais e responsáveis. A ideia dessa atualização, portanto, é tornar os controles parentais mais acessíveis.
Ao que tudo indica, o WhatsApp está liberando essa nova seção gradualmente para os seus usuários.
Novidades na beta
Testadores do WhatsApp no iOS também receberam sua leva de novidades nos últimos dias. Uma delas tem a ver com a busca por mensagens em chats, que ficou mais fácil graças a um atalho.
Como é possível notar na captura de tela abaixo, foi adicionado um botão com um ícone de lupa no canto inferior direito da tela de conversa, permitindo que usuários façam pesquisas sem perder as mensagens de vista.
Captura de tela/WABetaInfo
Esse atalho, no entanto, aparece apenas quando o usuário navega por mensagens antigas na conversa, garantindo que ele não poluirá a interface em momentos em que não é útil.
O segundo teste da vez trata-se de um alerta que aparecerá na parte de baixo da tela sempre que o usuário entrar em novos canais, os quais vêm silenciados por padrão. Assim, ele pode ativar as notificações rapidamente caso queira ser notificado sobre novas atualizações daquele espaço.
Captura de tela/WABetaInfo
Como canais costumam ser bem movimentados, é bem comum que o usuário opte por silenciá-los indefinidamente, impedindo-os de lotar sua central de notificações. No entanto, se o canal que você acabou de entrar não se encaixa nessa descrição, agora ficou mais fácil “desmutá-lo”.
O novo atalho de busca foi notado na versão 26.31.10.70 beta do WhatsApp, enquanto o novo alerta pode ser encontrado na versão 26.31.10.25 beta do mensageiro — ambas disponíveis no TestFlight.
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