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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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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.

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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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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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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Meta tried to buy Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, now going for execs

Meta's superintelligence seems to be growing, amid reports of wild cash offers for talent. — Zuckerberg, caricatured here, is going all in on his new superintelligence team at Meta. (Picture: Tim Reckmann, CC BY 2.0)

UPDATED. OpenAI pioneer Sutskever started the company a year ago, after leaving OpenAI during the CEO and boardroom scuffle, and it was valued at $32 billion during a recent funding round, reports CNBC.

They rebuffed Meta’s buyout offer, CNBC writes, claiming information from anonymous sources close to the transaction.

Now, Meta has turned their eyes to recruiting the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence and the previous AI chief at Apple, Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who run an AI venture fund together— which Meta would hold a stake in as part of the deal.

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Meta invests $14.3 billion in infrastructure company Scale AI, rivals leaving

Met Acquires 49% of Scale AI. — After weeks of speculation, Meta’s Scale AI deal is finally done. (Picture: Ishmael Daro, CC BY 2.0)

Hoping to straighten out its AI efforts, the Facebook owner forks out a stunning amount for 49% of the company. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang now joins Meta in a new «superintelligence» group.

With Meta calling it a «strategic partnership,» Wang is expected to be joined by «a small number of Scale AI employees,» writes CNBC.

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Keep AI queries private, Mozilla petitions Meta

It's too easy to share Meta AI queries, and most dont understand they are doing it. — Meta AI users don’t understand what they are sharing, leading to embarrassment — or worse. (Picture: Wesley Fryer, CC BY 2.0)

Mozilla has launched a public petition calling on Meta to shut down its new «Discovery» feed in the Meta AI app, arguing that the tool is «invasive» and violates user expectations of privacy.

The new feature — part of Meta AI’s expansion across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — surfaces old queries in the Discovery feed in Meta AI’s new Llama 4 app.

People don’t know what they are sharing
There is a button in the app where you have to give explicit permission for Meta to share your query , but it seems to be getting lost in the rollout across the Meta universe.

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Meta delays flagship Behemoth model due to performance issues

Prescient words from Facebook's developer conference in 2017. — Prescient words from Meta’s developer conference in 2017. (Picture: Anthony Quintano (CC BY 2.0))

The 2 trillion parameter model was teased at the launch of Llama 4 in early April, and was slated for a release at the LlamaCon, Meta’s AI developer conference in late April.

Now it seems following internal dismay at the model’s performance, it was delayed until June, and has just been postponed again until sometime in the fall or later, writes Reuters.

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Judge in Meta’s copyright case questions fair use defense

A judge finds scant evidence for fair use by Meta. (Picture: Jeroen van Luin, CC BY 2.0)

In a hearing for summary judgment in the case where a group of authors sued Meta for copyright infringement, the judge seemed to side with the authors, but also said they needed to make a clearer case of actual harm, writes Ars Technica.

The case revolves around whether AI companies like Meta can use copyrighted works in the training of their models, which they claim is fair use, while the authors seek damages and compensation for the fact that they copied all of their work without authorization.

The case could upend the entire AI market, and Meta fears it would make them less competitive should they lose.

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Big Tech embraces AI coding, hitting 30% of software

Major big tech businesses are doing substantial amounts of AI coding. — Gemini 2.5 Pro opens even more avenues for coding, says Alphabet. They are taking that to heart. (Picture: Google)

With Satya Nadella’s announcement overnight that Microsoft uses AI to code around 30% of their software, AI coding has come of age. Other Big Tech companies have also reported similar numbers lately.

— I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during a conversation at LlamaCon, Meta’s AI developer conference, according to CNBC

Microsoft says they have made progress with Python, and less with C++ projects, but he is still pointing that some projects could be entirely written by AI.

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Meta AIs new Llama 4 app has access to Facebook, Instagram

Meta AIs standalone app has access to your Facebook and Insta, and will let you share prompts with friends. — Meta AIs standalone will also let you share prompts with friends. (Picture: Meta)

Meta’s Llama 4 might just be the largest AI deployment in the world, having rolled out across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Now it’s getting its own standalone app.

Meta’s blog post touts the potential of linking it with your other Meta accounts so it can get to know you better, and says the app will remember things about you that you explicitly ask it to retain — or information you already shared on Facebook, for example.

This is slightly off what ChatGPT offers outside the EU, where the app will add all previous chats to its «memory.» The memory feature in Meta AI is also not available in the EU, limiting this service to the USA and Canada for now.

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Tariffs could cost Meta $7 billion in advertising loss

Meta stands to lose big on China revenue. (Picture: www.shopcatalog.com, CC BY 2.0)

Analysts at MoffettNathanson have published a new research report that notes Metas total China revenue was $18.35 billion last year — or 11% of its total sales, according to CNBC.

Should the China tariffs stay in place, they are likely to influence the ad buying of fast fashion brands like Shein and Temu, which are some of the biggest advertisers on Facebook and Instagram.

— While Meta does not provide a country-level breakdown of revenue within Europe, we logically can presume that China is Meta’s second-largest revenue source after the United States — a remarkable position for a country where Meta has no users or active platforms, say the analysts in the report, according no CNBC.

If a feared recession should also hit this year, it could wipe $23 billion in revenue off balance sheet for Facebook — a 25% decrease.

Advertising is usually the first thing businesses cut in a downturn, hitting consumer facing businesses hard, and especially news and the media.

Read more at CNBC

Meta gamed the LMArena AI benchmarks with new model

People are astounded Meta used a non public, unreleased and optimized model on the industry’s most respected benchmark. (Picture: Meta)

According to several reports, it seems Meta used an unpublished Llama 4 Maverick model created especially to score well on the LMArena benchmark.

Surprisingly good ranking
The largest selling point for their latest Maverick model was how well it did in precisely this benchmark, scoring just above ChatGPT 4o-latest and and slightly below Gemini 2.5 Pro, considered the current cutting edge of AI engineering.

The fact that Llama 4 Maverick got second place in between these, on the most watched leaderboard in AI, raised a lot of eyebrows over the weekend.

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Meta drops Llama 4 models, with «mixture of experts»

The Llama 4 models take off to a great start with the benchmarks, runs on little hardware, and is really cost efficient. — The Llama 4 models seem tailor made for STEM benchmarks, runs on little hardware, and is very cost efficient. (Picture: LadyDragonflyCC, CC BY 2.0)

The latest models out of Meta, the Llama 4 Maverick and the Scout, aren’t reasoning models, but put in extra work by using a panel of «experts» instead.

The models are rolling out right now on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct, where they are free for everyone with a membership.

Will answer «contentious» questions
According to TechCrunch, the new models will answer questions previous models wouldn’t, responding to «debated» questions and «contentious» prompts «without judgement:»

— We’re continuing to make Llama more responsive so that it answers more questions, can respond to a variety of different viewpoints, and doesn’t favor some views over others, a meta spokesperson told the website.

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