Meta has released Muse Glimmer, a slimmed-down open-weight AI model designed to run locally on a single GPU for agent tasks such as scheduling, file management, coding, and tool use. The release is based on Meta's closed Muse Spark 1.2 model and appears to be aimed at attracting developers who want capable AI agents without relying entirely on cloud-hosted services. Engadget reports: Facebook said that it's making the "weights" that AI systems use to choose responses available to everyone on Hugging Face along with developer documentation. The download is available for free, and users can run the model on their own PCs. The company noted that optimized integrations will land on llama.cpp and other sites, "so you can go from download to working agent in minutes." The model is powerful for its size, according to Meta, with the "strong success rates" on benchmarks like DeepSearch QA, MCP-Atlas and SWE-Bench (which evaluates its ability write and debug code). It also supports reliable tool use, multi-step reasoning, failure recovery, multimodal input and scaffold compatibility for work with OpenClaw and other agent orchestrators. It was trained on data from over 100 languages, the company added. "Rather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an essay accompanying Muse Glimmer's release. "This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before."

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"Meta has axed a controversial feature that allowed users to modify photos from public Instagram accounts using AI," reports TechCrunch: The feature, which wasn't designed to alert a user if their photos were used in this way, prompted immediate backlash... The company issued a blog post Friday announcing that it was removing the feature. Puck News founding partner Dylan Byers was the first to share the company's decision... Byers notes that the decision to do away with the feature came "amid scrutiny from users and talent agencies, including CAA."

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Meta "said in a court filing on Monday that four states were seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties," reports Reuters, "over accusations the company designed its Facebook and Instagram platforms to addict young users and misled the public about their safety." Meta put forward the figure in its response to the attorneys general's filings on how penalties should be calculated if the states prevailed at trial. The number, which has not previously been disclosed and is close to Meta's market capitalization of around $1.5 trillion, comes ahead of an August trial in Oakland, California, over the claims brought by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey against the company. Meta said the amount was unsupported by the evidence. "A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement," the company said in the filing. "The plaintiffs' outlandish calculations have no basis in fact or law," the company said in a statement, adding that it would continue to defend itself against the states' demands. A spokesperson for California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement the lawsuit "alleges Meta has prioritized profits over the safety of kids and fueled the mental health crisis we see impacting a generation of American children. The California Department of Justice looks forward to holding Meta fully accountable at trial in August...." Meta has denied the allegations, saying the attorneys general have no evidence it misled consumers about its platforms' alleged addictiveness because "social media addiction" is not an established psychiatric condition, and therefore statements that its platforms were not addictive could not be false... Last month, [U.S. District Judge] Rogers rejected Meta's bid to cancel the trial, saying there remained factual disputes over whether its social media platforms were addictive, whether Meta falsely denied it designed them that way, and whether it "partially" directed the platforms at children. "A further 14 states have brought claims under their own laws, which will be heard at a separate trial in February..." Thanks to Slashdot reader Sparkatron for sharing the article.

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Meta has launched its first smart glasses without Ray-Ban branding. Starting at $299, they're cheaper than the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 while retaining EssilorLuxottica as a design and manufacturing partner. The Verge reports: As far as style and specs, the Meta Glasses aren't that different from Ray-Bans. The internal specs are the same as the recently released Ray-Ban Meta Optics Styles, with slightly longer battery life. The Adventurer models have thinner rims, while the Fury models hew a bit closer to the Meta Ray-Ban Display with a bolder, chunkier frame. You could describe the Adventurer as square, and the Fury as even more square. The Kylie glasses sport a more unique design with a distinct Y2K flavor that I'm told is meant to be worn lower on your nose. [...] While playing around with the Meta Glasses, it was hard not to notice that the camera appears smaller than in previous Ray-Ban glasses. Technically, Himel tells me, that's not new to these Meta Glasses. It was actually introduced back in March with the prescription-optimized Optics Styles. [...] Meta is quadrupling down on AI. The new Meta Glasses will all launch with Muse Spark, the first model out of Meta's Superintelligence Labs. (It'll also be arriving on older Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses in the US and Canada via a software update.) Supposedly, that means more helpful glasses. At my hands-on, I was told that Meta AI would now be less stiff. I'd be able to talk to it more naturally and get smarter responses. The AI now supports 14 more languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi, and Korean. Pedestrian turn-by-turn navigation is also coming to Meta's displayless glasses. Later this month, there'll be a new "dynamic photo" feature that automatically takes multiple frames and then recommends the best one.

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Meta has lobbied the U.S. Congress for legal immunity from child-harm claims tied to social media products such as Instagram, as it faces thousands of lawsuits from young users and their families, according to a source familiar with the matter and proposed legislative language reviewed by Reuters. If adopted by lawmakers and passed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the U.S. Senate, such a provision could undermine thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other online platforms over harms to children. Meta and Google's YouTube face a combined $6 million in damages after they lost the first case at trial early this year. While legislators have given no indication of adopting the language, the lobbying effort shows the kind of legal protections Meta is seeking amid the biggest attempt to regulate online platforms in the U.S. since the 1990s. Meta has reportedly proposed the language in exchange for dropping its opposition to KOSA. Under the law, platforms would be required to mitigate harms to minors tied to features such as infinite scrolling, notifications, and appearance-altering filters.

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Editor’s Note: We’ll feature Lawrence’s List every week.  It will include interesting things he’s come across during the week as he’s an avid consumer of internet garbage and follows a […]

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