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."
"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."
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.
Do you remember the metaverse? If you don’t, don’t worry. In 2026, four years into the AI revolution that’s changing the world forever, you could easily be forgiven for thinking it was a strange fever dream you had back in 2021. You might even have odd memories of seeing a blocky version of Mark Zuckerberg floating about in a Minecraft-inspired hellscape, conducting meetings with people who could walk with no legs, while the real Mark Zuckerberg was looking at the whole thing through VR goggles. At least, that’s my memory of it.
I could be suffering from the Mandela effect, but I distinctly remember something off about the legs. They fixed that in a later version, but that’s my overriding memory — no legs. Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg assuring us that this was the future. He’d spent tens of billions of dollars on it, even changing the company name from Facebook to Meta, just to let us know he was really serious about the metaverse. Even if the legs didn’t work.
The problem was, it looked laughable. While everything in the technology world to do with games and special effects was moving in the direction of hyper-realism, the metaverse was moving in the opposite direction, towards the sort of blocky graphics that small children enjoy. But even that didn’t really answer the most basic question about the metaverse. Why? What possible advantage was there for us all to meet in a VR space where clunky avatars of ourselves could interact… badly?
Then AI happened and Meta abruptly forgot about the metaverse and pivoted towards the mission of putting personal superintelligence in all our hands instead, which sounds as terrifying and dangerous as it actually is, but we are where we are. At least when Zuckerberg was obsessed with the metaverse, we could ignore him. It existed somewhere “over there”, in Meta-land, where we could let him get on with it. Now he’s right up in our business again.
Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. (Image credit: Future)
The rise of a bad idea
I’ve always been fascinated by how Zuckerberg got into the metaverse and why he became so obsessed with it. The origins of the metaverse go way back. In March 2014, Facebook bought Oculus, the VR company, for about $2 billion. This was where his passion for VR started. Think of it as the seed, not the full obsession.
By July 2021, Zuckerberg gave a long interview to Casey Newton at The Verge about Facebook becoming a “metaverse company” and described it as an “embodied internet”. Then, on October 28, 2021, his obsession became the company identity. Zuckerberg announced that Facebook the company was becoming Meta at Connect 2021, saying the new company brand would focus on bringing the metaverse to life.
I can see the logic. As a business strategy, that made sense. As a product ordinary people were expected to use, it was much harder to understand. Zuckerberg did not want Meta/Facebook to be trapped inside someone else’s platform again. Facebook had won on social, but on mobile it remained dependent on Apple and Google for distribution, privacy rules, app-store policies and hardware. The metaverse looked like a chance to own the next operating system of social life: hardware, avatars, identity, payments, meetings, gaming, work, commerce — the whole stack. In his 2021 founder’s letter, he framed the metaverse as the “next chapter of the internet” and said Meta would become “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
Facebook had obviously had its problems — it was scandal-ridden. It had let advertisers target vulnerable teenagers, helped fake news spread, and enabled the spread of hate speech linked to atrocities in Myanmar. Perhaps Zuckerberg was looking for a way out of Facebook, and the metaverse offered that.
What I still didn’t understand was why he didn’t see what the rest of us saw — that it looked terrible and offered no real benefit to users. Then I read Sarah Wynn-Williams’ tell-all book about Facebook, Careless People, and it all started to make sense.
To say the book made my jaw hit the floor on several occasions would be an understatement. It’s an absolute page-turner, and your reactions grow from mild amusement to shock, then disbelief, then absolute outrage the further through the book you get. I’m aware of the criticisms of Wynn-Williams: that it is a book written by a disgruntled employee, and that she dodges a lot of personal responsibility for her part in the various misdeeds of the company. However, in another perfect example of the Streisand effect, the fact that Meta obtained a legal order in the United States to prevent her from saying anything negative about the company — at all — made me want to pick it up, and I’m glad I did.
Because now I get it — Zuckerberg seems to have spent years in an environment where too few people were willing to tell him when his ideas weren’t good. According to Wynn-Williams, he was surrounded by sycophants. When he had bad ideas, like the ill-fated Internet.org, he wouldn’t let them go and persisted with them, even when they were obviously going to fail. The people around him enabled him because he was simply too powerful. They even let him win at the board games he liked to play with them at his house or on his jet, and — crucially — he didn’t notice that they were letting him win. I can imagine that in that environment, nobody inside Meta would want to tell Zuckerberg that his metaverse was the equivalent of the emperor’s new clothes, especially if they wouldn’t even risk beating him at Settlers of Catan.
Wynn-Williams only mentions the metaverse in her epilogue. It happened after she was brutally fired from Facebook. Perhaps selfishly, I wish she’d been there for the metaverse period, because I would love to read firsthand accounts of how and why Zuckerberg persisted with such an obviously bad idea.
An avatar of Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., rides a hydrofoil during the virtual Facebook Connect event. (Image credit: Getty Images / Bloomberg)
The fall of the metaverse
Maybe I’m being too harsh on Zuckerberg. The metaverse graphics did get better over time and Apple ventured slightly into the same territory with its Apple Vision Pro, even after the metaverse had turned into a smoldering wasteland. The fact is, people don’t enjoy wearing VR goggles for extended periods of time, and for normal people, VR lacks that one killer app. There doesn’t seem to be anything you can do in a VR space that you can’t do elsewhere much more easily.
The metaverse didn’t really die with a bang, but with a whimper. It faded through layoffs, spending cuts and the AI pivot. If I had to put a date on it, I’d say early 2023 was when Meta’s narrative moved on. In February and March 2023, Zuckerberg started talking about Meta’s “year of efficiency” and announced huge layoffs and cost-cutting. OpenAI had launched ChatGPT in November 2022, and by early 2023, generative AI had swallowed the oxygen that ideas like the metaverse need to survive. Every tech company was talking about AI now, not virtual offices and avatar legs.
The metaverse was over. We all forgot about it and moved on.
I’m glad I read Wynn-Williams’ book, because now I can understand how Facebook let the metaverse happen. And if there’s one thing I learned from reading it, it’s that money and power can bring you a lot of things, but common sense requires neither.
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.
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.
It looks like Meta is having a rough Friday morning. Starting shortly before 10 AM ET, reports began to spike from users unable to access both Facebook and WhatsApp, with the number of complaints continuing to climb.
The trailer for The Social Reckoning has now been released — and it's at almost exactly the same time as another Facebook whistleblower controversy is being 'silenced'.
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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