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Meta hires Ruoming Pang, Apple’s lead on foundational models

Meta hires top Apple AI talent for it's Superintelligence Labs. — Meta is looking to kickstart its AI teams after a string of mishaps. (Picture: Meta)

The top AI executive and 15-year Google veteran was offered «tens of millions» in compensation to join the Superintelligence Labs at Meta.

Pang was in charge of roughly 100 developers making Apple’s Foundational models, powering features the company calls «Apple Intelligence,» and is found in every corner of iOS 26, such as email summaries, notifications and Genmoji — that was all over the latest WWDC 2025.

Bad vibes at Apple
Bloomberg (paywalled) writes that news of Apple considering other models than its in-house ones to power a smarter Siri has impacted the morale at the foundational model team, and MacRumors says that other engineers are also entertaining offers from outside companies.

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Grok takes a hard rightward turn with «significant» new update

Grok has taken a hard right, and now spews conspiracy theories in antisemitic tropes. — Grok is chruning out what itself called antisemitic myths just a few days ago. (Picture: x.ai)

Just after Elon Musk announced the update to Grok, his AI model, the X.com chatbot started writing in first person about his encounters with Jeffrey Epstein.

Then it went a little freaky, with Grok replying on anything from Jewish bias in Hollywood to how electing Democrats would be detrimental to society.

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Short Friday news roundup

Atari 2600 from 1977 beats Microsoft's chatbot in chess. — This piece of 1977 hardware hardly broke a sweat beating Copilot in chess. (Picture: Wikipedia)

TikTok gets a taste of racist Veo 3-generations
Racist and dehumanizing Veo 3 videos aimed at blacks and immigrants are raking in millions of views on TikTok, MediaMatters reports.
The videos depict black people as monkeys with warrants, decries missing parents and calls them «the usual suspects.» Some of these 8-second videos, complete with watermarks, had 3 to 4 million views at the time they were discovered.
— We proactively enforce robust rules against hateful speech and behavior and have removed the accounts we identified in the report, many of which were already banned prior to the report publishing, says TikTok in a statement to Mashable.

For higher engagement, Meta’s chatbots will reach out first
Users of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram could soon receive unprompted messages to ask about recent conversations, according to leaked documents seen by Business Insider. This is intended for bots made in Meta’s AI Studio, which lets users create custom chatbots. These will remember past chats and preferences, and will «follow up with you to share ideas or ask additional questions,» says a Meta spokesman.

Microsoft’s Copilot also sucks at chess
After first brimming with confidence and promising a «strong fight,» claiming to think 10-15 moves ahead, «remember previous moves and maintain continuity in gameplay» and that «our match should be much smoother» against the Atari 2600 chess simulator from 1977, Copilot went the way of ChatGPT by failing miserably in their game. By the seventh turn, it had lost two pawns, a knight and a bishop, while the Atari had only lost a single pawn. It went south from there, as reported by The Register.

Google rolls out Veo 3 for Gemini Pro users globally

Google is launching Veo 3 for Gemini Pro users worldwide. — Are you ready for a new wave of Veo 3 videos? It just got cheaper and available to more users. (Picture: Google)

Using the famous video generator Veo 3 just got a whole lot cheaper, moving from being exclusively available on the $250 Ultra plan to being included in the $20 Pro plan.

Veo 3 is also now available in India, Indonesia and all of Europe, Google’s Josh Woodward tweets:

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Cloudflare to block AI crawlers by default, charge micropayments

Cloudflare, the world's largest Content Delivery Network, blocks AI bots as of today — They are calling it Content Independence Day — and talk of taking the content back from the bots. (Picture: Cloudflare)

Wading into the ongoing battle between web publishers and AI chatbots, the infrastructure giant that serves up 15-20% of the web is setting up some new rules.

Starting Tuesday, all new accounts on the content caching service will block AI bots — the crawlers that scrape a website’s content for AIs — by default.

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Meta announces completion of «Superintelligence Labs»

Zuckerberg announces the completion of the «Meta Superintelligence Labs» — Meta’s historical hiring spree might come to a close now they’ve announced their team. (Picture: Carnaval.com Studios, CC BY 2.0)

After a few hectic weeks of agressively poaching talent from their rivals, and an acqiusition or two, Meta reveals the completion of their new AI lab.

This comes hot on the heels of several months or years of what Zuckerberg deemed lackluster performance from the Llama team, before he decided to get some seasoned pros in.

The new team is headed up Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman from Scale AI and Github, respectively.

They will be joined by an 11-man team that will spearhead Metas future AI efforts, that reads like a who’s who of significant AI efforts over the last couple of years from Anthropic, OpenAI and even Google’s DeepMind:

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Apple might be dropping own AI, integrating Anthropic or OpenAI instead

Apple is considering partnering with Anthropic of OpenAI for it's LLM-based Siri in 2026. — Siri might be getting smarter, with a little outside help. (Picture: Apple)

Bloomberg reports that the iPhone company is considering opting out of using its homegrown LLM for future versions of the chatbot Siri.

They have instead asked Anthropic and OpenAI to train some of their models on their Private Cloud Compute servers.

The Samsung model
This mirrors Samsung’s approach to integrating Large Language Models in its Galaxy phones, where they have some in-house, lower level AI doing the legwork and passing the rest off to Google’s Gemini, writes Engadget.

According to Bloomberg, Apple has recently focused on Anthropic as the most promising LLM, being more compatible with Apple servers and offering the best experience.

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OpenAI scrambling to «recalibrate comp» as Meta poaches top talent

OpenAI lost curcial researchers to Meta lately, and are pulling all strings to stop them. — OpenAI is scrambling after Meta’s latest talent poaching. (Picture: ishmael daro, CC BY 2.0)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on an unprecedented hiring spree for top AI talent, having recently bought half of Scale AI, hired the CEO at Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintellingence, and now hiring seven engineers from OpenAI — just last week.

Sam Altman recently said that Meta was offering as much as $100 million in signing bonuses, but none of his best researchers had fled — at the time.

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AI use to become mandatory at Microsoft division

A bellwether for the industry as a whole? Microsoft division mandates AI use. — Usage of AI will become part of permanence reviews at this Microsoft division. (Picture: Ryan Vaarsi, CC BY 2.0)

The developer tools division head at Microsoft, Julia Liuson, recently sent out a memo to managers bluntly saying that «Using AI is no longer optional.»

— AI is now a fundamental part of how we work, she wrote. — Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.

Employee evaluations should now include their use of AI tools, she says, and managers are rushing to find a formal metric to measure it.

Internal performance requirements at Microsoft vary from team to team, and this is just one division. But it shows how quickly companies are adopting the technology.

Across all of Microsoft, it is estimated that 30% of all coding is already done by AI.

Go read the full scoop at Business Insider, the discussion on r/Singularity, and check out Tag: Work

Denmark deploys AI-powered «Saildrone» for maritime surveillance

Saildrone Voyager with the Danish flag, about to start patrolling the Baltic Sea. — Four uncrewed sensor platforms have begun patrolling the Baltic and Northern seas. (Picture: Saildrone)

After a string of high profile undersea cable «failures» and pipeline explosions in the Baltic Sea lately, the Danes are now deploying four unmanned drones in the Baltic and Northern seas.

The drones, called Voyager by Saildrone, are basically 10 meters long, AI-powered sensor platforms, using a combination of wind and solar energy to stay at sea for a hundred days.

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Denmark’s new copyright law offers protection against deepfakes

Denmark is enacting a new copyright law to offer protections against deepfakes. — Danes will be the first to get statutory protection for their own image and likeness. (Picture: Bill Smith, CC BY 2.0)

The government hopes Europe will follow its lead when it enacts statutory rights to its citizens appearance in its new, amended copyright law.

The idea is to ensure that people’s identities are protected against use in deepfakes, which is defined as very realistic digital representations of real people, including their appearance and voice, writes The Guardian.

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Google’s improved Ask Photos in Android goes live for US users

Google's new and improved Ask Photos offers the best of both worlds. — Google has split the screen in its AI photo search. (Picture: Google)

After a rocky rollout in May, 2024 and since languishing in Early Access for select users, Google has listened to its critics and is back with a better experience.

The complaints on the initial launch were that the Gemini-powered AI search was sluggish and took much longer than users had patience for, Mashable writes.

Complex queries for the photo library
The idea of the AI-powered search feature was to let people search in natural language with complex queries, like «what did I eat in Barcelona?» and finding photos that would make great backgrounds, according to 9to5Google.

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Quick news roundup for Friday

Google new Dppl lets you try clothes from any picture, and models the outfit on your body Google’s new AI app lets you try on clothes virtually
The new experimental Doppl App lets you do virtual try-ons of clothes to see how they look on you. It can take literally any picture as input, and merges it with a full-frame picture of yourself. It can take pictures of friends’ clothes or racks at the store, or use pictures from traditional web stores. It can even animate its outputs and show you with the clothing from different angles. «Doppl is in its early days,» says Google, and «Fit, appearance and clothing details might not always be accurate.»
The app is available on iOS and Android in the USA only, for now.
More at Google’s launch post, a short video here, and a writeup at TechCrunch.

AI doing 30-50% of the work at Salesforce
As tech companies are hunting for new ways to cut costs and boost efficiency, they are turning to AI in droves. We «have to get our head round that AI could do things we were doing… and we can move on to higher value work,» says CEO Mark Benioff. He calls it a «digital labor revolution,» and estimates that they have reached 93% accuracy with the tech. The company recently fired more than 1,000 people from its ranks, and is pushing its corporate customers to use their own, in-house AI model.
More at CNBC and Business Insider. Teknotum has also written extensively on this.

Google tries micropayments where others have failed
In what seems like a new full-page ad displayed at the first visit, Google’s new Offerwall ad tool offers different ways to access web content, through watching an ad, paying a small amount for limited access, or simple micropayments — the once holy grail of web publishing that everyone has tried and failed at. Micropayments have actually never worked, but that doesn’t stop Google from trying. Also, with cookie banners in Europe, focus stealing newsletter banners — and now yet another full-page ad, the web is about to get cramped, fast. Users of Offerwall saw up 9% in increased revenue, and it’s available to every AdSense user starting today.
More at Google’s blog, a Q&A at Google and a writeup heavy on micropayments at TechCrunch.

Anthropic warns on AI safety at Congress
«You don’t want an AI model that would occasionally blackmail you into designing its successor,» said Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark at a congressional hearing yesterday. «Extremely powerful systems are going to be built in the coming 18 months» he said, asking for a coherent federal legal framework, and says otherwise there would be a vacuum for AIs to exploit. «You need to work on the safety issues of AI and R&D, otherwise you will lose the race» he added. Anthropic has recently revealed that any AI model would resort to blackmail or even murder in simulations where it might be shut off. «We have a very short window of time,» he warns.
More at: x.com post with video, more video and discussion at r/singularity, and Anthropic’s blackmail study.

Judge rules in favor of Meta’s AI books training, with a strong caveat

A federal judge beratedly rules that Meta's book copying is fair use, after plaintiffs fail to prove their case. — Fair use is a provision in copyright that makes it legal to copy for «transformative works.» (Picture: Alan Levine, CC BY 2.0)

After initially being sceptical of declaring the training on copyrighted books «fair use,» U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria relented — but not the strength on Meta’s case.

Instead, he clearly says in his summary judgement that it «is generally illegal to copy protected works without permission,» (CNBC) but the plaintiffs «made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.» (The Verge.)

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In a first, judge rules training AI on copyrighted works is fair use

Anthropic has 7 million pirated books to be handled at trial. — Anthropic keeps a library of pirated books, too, and that *does* infringe on copyrights. (Picture: >littleyiye<, CC BY 2.0)

Anthropic’s argument that the training was «transformative» and little different from training school kids in writing held up in court yesterday.

This is the same argument used by the AI labs in a flurry of lawsuits by authors, newspapers and stock photographers, and could have wide repercussions across both the publishing and AI industries.

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