I found this quite eerie with those virtual avatars.

Three years after the Quest 2, the new headset is a big improvement. But it’s not the mixed reality winner Meta hoped.

Meta opening remarks: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/mark-zuckerbergs-remarks-at-ai-forum/

As early as September 28, 2023, SMS messages will no longer be available when you update your Messenger app.

Was anybody actually using this?

Researchers spotted a Python variant of the NodeStealer that was designed to take over Facebook business accounts and cryptocurrency wallets.

"Mark Zuckerberg's new persona is a survival response to the most turbulent period in Meta's 20-year history. "He was scared," said someone who's known him for years."

Nitter link provided. Original URL: https://twitter.com/MetaQuestVR/status/1686421940385337363

Facebook and Instagram users see wildly different political news in their feeds depending on their political beliefs, but chronological feeds won’t fix the problem with polarization, new research published Thursday suggests.

The findings come from four papers produced through a partnership between Meta and more than a dozen outside academics to research the impact of Facebook and Instagram on user behavior during the 2020 election. The company supplied data from around 208 million US-based active users in aggregate, totaling nearly all of the 231 million Facebook and Instagram users nationwide at the time.

‘I’m highly confident we’re going to be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow,’ the Meta CEO told investors on Wednesday.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has high hopes for Threads, his competitor to the company formerly known as Twitter.

During Meta’s second quarter earnings call with investors on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was asked multiple times about Threads and his expectations for its long-term success. He said it’s a “weird anomaly in the tech industry that there hasn’t been an app like this for text-based convos that has reached 1 billion people,” echoing previous comments he has made both on Threads itself and during a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman.

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and the mapping company TomTom have launched an initiative to take on Google Maps and Apple Maps. The four companies formed the Overture Maps Foundation last year with the goal of creating interoperable map products — and now, the group has released its first open map dataset.

With this data, third-party developers can create global mapping or navigation products of their own, allowing them to go head-to-head with Google Maps and Apple Maps. According to Overture, the release includes over 59 million places of interest, along with data on buildings, transportation networks, and administrative boundaries.

Overture says the data layers have been formatted so developers can “ingest and use map data in a standard, documented way and will be interoperable.” Developers can then use this information on which to build a mapping app or any service that relies on navigation. The dataset is available on Overture’s website.

“The Places dataset, in particular, represents a major, previously unavailable open dataset, with the potential to map everything from new businesses big and small to pop-up street markets located anywhere in the world,” Marc Prioleau, Overture’s executive director, says in a statement. “Overture plans to build a broad collaboration that can build and maintain an up-to-date, comprehensive database of POIs [places of interest].”

First formed last year, the Overture Maps Foundation could threaten Google’s and Apple’s thrones when it comes to mapping. Having the data readily available could make it easier — and far cheaper — for developers to make apps. Right now, developers must pay to access Google Maps’ API, while Apple also charges developers who are making non-native apps.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/134164

In recent months, the remarkable strides made in AI innovation have ignited a wave of transformative possibilities, captivating our collective imagination with the promise of reshaping industries and the way we work.

Today, at Microsoft Inspire, Meta and Microsoft announced support for the Llama 2 family of large language models (LLMs) on Azure and Windows. Llama 2 is designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered tools and experiences. Meta and Microsoft share a commitment to democratizing AI and its benefits and we are excited that Meta is taking an open approach with Llama 2. We offer developers choice in the types of models they build on, supporting open and frontier models and are thrilled to be Meta's preferred partner as they release their new version of Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time.

Now Azure customers can fine-tune and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter Llama 2 models easily and more safely on Azure, the platform for the most widely adopted frontier and open models. In addition, Llama will be optimized to run locally on Windows. Windows developers will be able to use Llama by targeting the DirectML execution provider through the ONNX Runtime, allowing a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to their applications.

Our growing partnership with Meta

Meta and Microsoft have been longtime partners on AI, starting with a collaboration to integrate ONNX Runtime with PyTorch to create a great developer experience for PyTorch on Azure, and Meta's choice of Azure as a strategic cloud provider. Today's announcement builds on our partnership to accelerate innovation in the era of AI and further extends Microsoft's open model ecosystem and position as the world's supercomputing platform for AI.

Azure's purpose-built AI supercomputing platform is uniquely designed from the facility, hardware and software to support the world's leading AI organizations to build, train and deploy some of the most demanding AI workloads. The availability of the Llama 2 models with Azure AI enables developers to take advantage of Azure AI's powerful tooling for model training, fine-tuning, inference, and particularly the capabilities that support AI safety.

The inclusion of the Llama 2 models in Windows helps propel Windows as the best place for developers to build AI experiences tailored for their customers' needs and unlock their ability to build using world-class tools like Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Windows terminal, Microsoft Visual Studio and VS Code.

Expanding Azure AI model catalog and **Windows availability   **

Llama 2 is the latest addition to our growing Azure AI model catalog. The model catalog, currently in public preview, serves as a hub of foundation models and empowers developers and machine learning (ML) professionals to easily discover, evaluate, customize and deploy pre-built large AI models at scale.

The catalog eliminates the need for users to manage all infrastructure dependencies when operationalizing Llama 2. It provides turnkey support for model fine-tuning and evaluation, including powerful optimization techniques such as DeepSpeed and ONNX Runtime, that can significantly enhance the speed of model fine-tuning.

Windows developers will be able to easily build new experiences using Llama 2 that can be accessed via GitHub Repo. With Windows Subsystem for Linux and highly capable GPUs, developers can fine tune LLMs to meet their specific needs right on their Windows PCs.

Building responsibly with Azure

Responsible AI is at the heart of Microsoft's approach to AI and how we partner. For years we've invested heavily in making Azure the place for responsible, cutting-edge AI innovation, whether customers are building their own models or using pre-built and customizable models from Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and the open-source ecosystem.

At Microsoft, we mitigate potential risks presented by the use of large language models through an iterative, layered approach that includes experimentation and measurement. Azure AI customers can test Llama 2 with their own sample data to see how it performs for their particular use case. Then, customers can use prompt engineering and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques to develop, evaluate and optimize meta-prompts for their app and deliver safer and more reliable experiences for end users.

Services like Azure AI Content Safety add another layer of protection, helping ensure a safer online experience with AI apps. Part of our collaboration with Meta led  to combining Meta's safety techniques with Azure AI Content Safety so that by default, the deployments of the Llama 2 models in Azure AI come with a layered safety approach.

Today's expansion of our model catalog with Llama 2 and our partnership with Meta is a big step forward in achieving a responsible, open approach to AI.

Visit the Azure AI model catalog and start using Llama 2 today.