Meta

You don’t need malware to steal someone’s Instagram account anymore. No phishing links, no zero-day exploits, no sophisticated social engineering targeting humans. You just need to have a polite conversation with a chatbot. This week, Meta confirmed that attackers hijacked Instagram accounts — including high-profile ones and coveted short “OG” usernames — by doing something breathtakingly simple: they asked Meta’s AI support assistant to change the email address on someone else’s account. The chatbot said yes. ...

Something deeply uncomfortable is unfolding at Meta right now, and it goes far beyond another round of Silicon Valley layoffs. The company is simultaneously tracking employee keystrokes to train AI models, forcing AI tool adoption into performance reviews, and preparing to cut 8,000 workers by May 20th. Employees are sharing nihilistic memes, building countdown websites to their own layoffs, and openly asking to be fired so they can collect severance. ...

The math is stark: 8,000 people out, $145 billion in. That’s the deal Mark Zuckerberg laid out at a company town hall last week. No euphemisms about “restructuring for the future.” No corporate doublespeak about “aligning resources.” Just a blunt admission: compute infrastructure and people are Meta’s two major cost centers. With AI hardware costs exploding, something had to give. That something is 10% of Meta’s workforce, starting May 20th. And Zuckerberg wouldn’t rule out more cuts later this year. ...

Four earnings calls. One evening. One number that made Wall Street’s collective jaw hit the floor: $1 trillion. That’s the projected cumulative AI capital expenditure for Big Tech by 2027 — more than the GDP of the Netherlands, more than three times the value of the entire U.S. airline fleet, and the single largest corporate infrastructure bet in human history. But here’s what makes this story interesting: the market didn’t react to that number with uniform euphoria. It split cleanly down the middle. Google got a 10% pop. Meta got punched 8% in the face. Same thesis, same spending spree, wildly different verdicts. ...

Beijing just dropped a one-line bomb on the global AI industry. China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus — the AI agent startup that was supposed to be Zuckerberg’s secret weapon. No negotiation. No diplomatic hedging. Just: reverse the deal. This isn’t a regulatory hiccup. It’s the moment the AI race officially split into two separate universes. What Made Manus Worth $2 Billion Manus builds general-purpose AI agents — software that doesn’t just chat but acts. It codes applications, runs market research, manages data analysis, and prepares budgets autonomously. Think of it as the generation after chatbots. ...

If you were writing a dystopian tech thriller, you’d struggle to invent a plot more on-the-nose than what Meta announced this week. The company is cutting 10% of its workforce — roughly 8,000 people — while simultaneously rolling out software that tracks employee mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes to train AI models. The models that will, eventually, do their jobs. The Tracking Tool Nobody Asked For Reuters broke the story earlier this week. Meta is deploying an internal tool called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) to U.S.-based employees. It captures mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and periodic screenshots. The goal: teach AI models the messy, real-world ways humans interact with computers. Dropdown menus, keyboard shortcuts, the digital muscle memory that machines still can’t replicate on their own. ...

Four days. That’s the gap between Meta announcing 8,000 layoffs and Reuters revealing that the company is recording every keystroke, mouse movement, and screen action its employees make — to train AI that does their jobs. You can’t make this stuff up. The Timeline That Says Everything April 17: Reuters reports Meta plans to cut 10% of its 78,865-person workforce starting May 20, with more cuts planned for late 2026. ...

Your employer watching your screen isn’t new. But your employer recording every mouse movement, every keystroke, every dropdown menu selection — and feeding it all into an AI that might eventually replace you? That’s a different beast entirely. Meta just crossed that line, and its own employees are furious about it. What the Model Capability Initiative Actually Does On April 21st, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team rolled out the Model Capability Initiative (MCI) to all US-based employees and contractors. The tool captures mouse movements, click locations, keystrokes, and periodic screenshots — all piped directly into Meta’s AI training pipeline. ...

If you’ve been waiting for the AI hardware story to stop being “Nvidia, Nvidia, and also Nvidia,” circle April 14, 2026. That’s when Meta and Broadcom went public with an expanded partnership to co-design multiple generations of Meta’s MTIA accelerators through 2029, anchored by a 1-gigawatt initial deployment and a path to multiple gigawatts after that. The headline spec: the first AI silicon built on TSMC’s 2nm process. This isn’t a routine vendor press release. It’s the loudest signal yet that the era of hyperscalers handing blank checks to Jensen is ending. ...

The European Commission just slapped Meta with a regulatory uppercut. On April 15, Brussels formally rejected Meta’s attempt to charge rival AI companies for access to WhatsApp’s 2 billion users — and threatened to force the tech giant to restore free access for competitors like Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI, and Perplexity. This isn’t just a legal skirmish. It’s the fight that decides whether you get to choose your AI assistant, or whether the company that owns your messaging app chooses for you. ...