Tag: META

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Meta reports 11% revenue growth in Q2 2023

Facebook meta.(photo:Pixabay.com)

Headcount was 71,469 as of June 30, a decrease of 14 per cent year-over-year. Approximately half of the employees impacted by the 2023 layoffs are included in the reported headcount…reports Asian Lite News

Meta has released its financial results report for the second quarter (Q2) of this year ended on June 30, in which it revealed that revenue was $32 billion — an increase of 11 per cent year-over-year — and Facebook’s monthly active users were 3.03 billion — a spike of 3 per cent year-over-year.

“We had a good quarter. We continue to see strong engagement across our apps and we have the most exciting roadmap I’ve seen in a while with Llama 2, Threads, Reels, new AI products in the pipeline, and the launch of Quest 3 this fall,” Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the report on Wednesday.

Moreover, the company reported that Facebook’s daily active users were 2.06 billion on average for June, an increase of 5 per cent year-over-year.

“Long-term debt was $18.38 billion as of June 30, 2023,” it added.

Headcount was 71,469 as of June 30, a decrease of 14 per cent year-over-year. Approximately half of the employees impacted by the 2023 layoffs are included in the reported headcount.

“Beginning in 2022, we initiated several measures to pursue greater efficiency and to realign our business and strategic priorities. As of June 30, we have substantially completed planned employee layoffs while continuing to assess facilities consolidation and data centre restructuring initiatives,” the company claimed.

Meta expects the third quarter (Q3) 2023 total revenue to be in the range of $32-$34.5 billion.

It also anticipates that the full-year 2023 total expenses will be in the range of $88-$91 billion, increased from the prior range of $86-$90 billion. This outlook includes about $4 billion of restructuring costs related to facilities consolidation charges and severance and other personnel costs.

Moreover, Meta said that it is expecting higher infrastructure-related costs next year.

“For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” it added.

ALSO READ-Meta’s Threads wanes

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Meta’s Threads wanes

Meta executives, however, have said they don’t see the falloff as worrisome and have said they are working on additional features……reports Asian Lite News

Instagram’s Twitter competitor Threads is reportedly fast losing steam, a massive 70 per cent decline from its highest in early July.

Despite Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that “10s of millions of people come back daily” on Threads, the number of daily active users on Threads dropped for the second week down to 13 million, “a 70 per cent decline from a July 7 high point,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

By comparison, Twitter’s daily active users are around 200 million.

“User engagement on Threads has continued to fall after an initial surge in sign-ups, putting pressure on parent Meta Platforms,” the report noted, citing Sensor Tower data.

Data show user engagement has fallen 70 per cent as “executives focus on options such as a chronological feed,” it added.

Meta executives, however, have said they don’t see the falloff as worrisome and have said they are working on additional features.

Threads is still new and needs several Twitter-like features to make it more competitive in the social media space.

Earlier reports mentioned that the so-called Twitter killer’s daily use has gone down miserably, with time spent by users now down by 50 per cent from 20 minutes to just 10 minutes.

Last week, Threads crossed 150 million user sign-ups despite a usage drop.

Meta launched Threads on July 5 for iOS and Android users in 100 countries, and it is among the top free apps on the App Store.

According to Data.ai, the app has surpassed more than 150 million downloads worldwide, within seven days after its launch.

Recent information revealed that Threads has gained the largest user presence in specific markets, with India leading the way, accounting for approximately 32 per cent of its downloads.

Following India is Brazil, contributing to approximately 22 per cent of Threads’ installations, and the US, representing nearly 16 per cent of the total.

ALSO READ: Most G20 members back RBI’s views on crypto

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WhatsApp gets restored after being down for several users

Education Industry with WhatsApp Classes.(photo:IANSLIFE)

Taking to Twitter, several users reported the issue. While one user asked “is it just me or is WhatsApp down?” another posted: “Me turning my wifi on and off 7 times but it was just WhatsApp down.”…reports Asian Lite News

Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp is now back online after facing a global outage, including in India, due to “connectivity issues”.

The company acknowledged the issue early Thursday and tweeted: “We’re working quickly to resolve connectivity issues with WhatsApp and we’ll update you here as soon as possible.” After about 20 minutes, it posted, “and we’re back, happy chatting!”

When a user posted, “fix it before it is morning in India, don’t want to miss out on the Good Morning messages”, the Meta-owned platform replied: “We’re back, we don’t want you to miss them!”

According to the outage monitor website DownDetector, 61 per cent of people had reported problems while sending messages, 35 per cent while using the application, and 4 per cent while using the website. On Downdetector, reports of the users peaked at over 41,000.

Taking to Twitter, several users reported the issue. While one user asked “is it just me or is WhatsApp down?” another posted: “Me turning my wifi on and off 7 times but it was just WhatsApp down.”

Last month, the messaging platform had faced a global outage that lasted for about two hours.

Some WhatsApp users were unable to use the platform on their mobile and desktop devices, while some were experiencing issues with sending and downloading media.

According to DownDetector, 76 per cent of people had reported problems while using the website, 17 per cent while using the application, and 7 per cent while sending messages.

In January this year, the messaging platform had faced a server-side issue globally on iOS, making it impossible to update the privacy setting “who can see when I’m online”.

In October last year, the platform had suffered a global outage including in India that lasted for over two hours.

ALSO READ-WhatsApp rolling out phone number privacy feature

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Meta blocks EU-based users from accessing Threads via VPN

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“I am a US citizen, have a US account with a US address and wireless number but staying in Europe for now and I was blocked too,” another user said…reports Asian Lite News

Meta (formerly Facebook) has confirmed that it is blocking EU-based users from using the newly-launched Instagram’s Threads app via VPN (Virtual Private Network).

After several users complained about being unable to access the app via VPN, Meta confirmed that such attempts are being blocked, reports TechCrunch.

Launched last week, Threads is not available in the EU due to privacy concerns. According to the company, it has taken additional steps to prevent users from accessing the new social app.

“Threads is not currently available in most countries in Europe and we’ve taken additional steps to prevent people based there from accessing it at this time. Europe continues to be an incredibly important market for Meta and we hope to make Threads available here in the future,” Meta was quoted as saying.

“Okay, it actually seems as if Meta truly decided to ban Europe in Threads, as it’s available globally, but not from Europe (even with a VPN),” a user wrote on Twitter.

“I am a US citizen, have a US account with a US address and wireless number but staying in Europe for now and I was blocked too,” another user said.

According to Meta’s privacy policy and the app’s iOS listing, the Threads app tracks users extensively, and the app may collect a variety of personal data, including highly sensitive information such as health and financial data, precise location, browsing history, contacts, and search history. In the EU, this approach poses legal and regulatory challenges for Meta.

As per the EU data protection law, Meta needs a valid legal basis to process such personal data legally for ad targeting — an area in which the company is facing increasing uncertainty as a result of a recent Court of Justice ruling, the report mentioned. Meanwhile, Meta’s Twitter rival had crossed 100 million signups in just a few days, despite not being officially rolled out in most of Europe.

ALSO READ-Meta introduces generative AI model ‘CM3leon’

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Meta introduces generative AI model ‘CM3leon’

Facebook meta.(photo:Pixabay.com)

CM3Leon’s zero-shot performance compares favourably to larger models trained on larger datasets, despite training on a dataset of only three billion text tokens…reports Asian Lite News

Meta (formerly Facebook) has introduced a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model — “CM3leon” (pronounced like chameleon), that does both text-to-image and image-to-text generation.

“CM3leon is the first multimodal model trained with a recipe adapted from text-only language models, including a large-scale retrieval-augmented pre-training stage and a second multitask supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage,” Meta said in a blogpost on Friday.

With CM3leon’s capabilities, the company said that the image generation tools can produce more coherent imagery that better follows the input prompts.

According to Meta, CM3leon requires only five times the computing power and a smaller training dataset than previous transformer-based methods.

When compared to the most widely used image generation benchmark (zero-shot MS-COCO), CM3Leon achieved an FID (Frechet Inception Distance) score of 4.88, establishing a new state-of-the-art in text-to-image generation and outperforming Google’s text-to-image model, Parti.

Moreover, the tech giant said that CM3leon excels at a wide range of vision-language tasks, such as visual question answering and long-form captioning.

CM3Leon’s zero-shot performance compares favourably to larger models trained on larger datasets, despite training on a dataset of only three billion text tokens.

“With the goal of creating high-quality generative models, we believe CM3leon’s strong performance across a variety of tasks is a step toward higher-fidelity image generation and understanding,” Meta said.

“Models like CM3leon could ultimately help boost creativity and better applications in the metaverse. We look forward to exploring the boundaries of multimodal language models and releasing more models in the future,” it added.

ALSO READ-Meta accused of anti-Asian bias

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Meta accused of anti-Asian bias

Vaishnavi Jayakumar said she was punished for asking how to move up the ranks at Meta, left out of opportunities, and layered under less experienced colleagues…reports Asian Lite News

An Indian-origin tech executive from Singapore has filed a lawsuit with the California’s Civil Rights Department accusing Meta of racial discrimination that cost her promotions and work opportunities. 

Vaishnavi Jayakumar, 36, who joined Meta in January 2020 after stints at Disney, Google and Twitter, said she was punished for asking how to move up the ranks at Meta, left out of opportunities, and layered under less experienced colleagues. 

“I’ve never felt more keenly that as an Asian woman, I’m destined to be a worker, I’m not destined to be a leader,” Jayakumar wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, adding that last month she faced “a retaliatory termination at Meta disguised as a mass layoff”. 

As the head of youth policy at Meta, Jayakumar was responsible for managing a team that provided guidance on age-appropriate policies and product features across all of Meta’s apps. 

“Everything went well for the first two years. I worked hard with my colleagues to improve the wellbeing of youth on Instagram and other Meta services, and received positive feedback,” Jayakumar said in her long post. 

However, after two years when she enquired about a path to promotion, she said she faced the familiar “bamboo ceiling” that Asian-Americans encounter. 

According to Jayakumar, her manager suddenly began giving racially-coded negative feedback, claiming she wasn’t senior enough for leadership, even though Jayakumar claimed she had more experience than other candidates. 

Jayakumar’s complaint referred to a 2022 study by Ascend, a network of Asian and Pacific Islander professionals, which said that 49 per cent of Meta’s workforce is Asian but only 25 per cent of its executives are Asian. 

Meta fired more than 11,000 employees at the end of 2022, followed by another 10,000 roles in another round of mass layoffs in March this year. Jayakumar’s complaint is just one among the rising number of lawsuits filed by Asian Americans in the tech industry calling for action against long-standing racial prejudice in Silicon Valley. 

According to USA Today, Jayakumar is demanding that Meta make policy changes, from tracking the rates of promotion for Asian Americans to training managers in tropes and stereotypes about Asian American employees. 

Meta has so far declined to comment. 

ALSO READ: Authors sue OpenAI, Meta over copyright infringement

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Authors sue OpenAI, Meta over copyright infringement

The lawsuit alleged that chatbot never bothered to “reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”…reports Asian Lite News

Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued Sam Altman-run OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta over dual claims of copyright infringement.

The lawsuits alleged that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA (a set of large language models) were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works.

Their works were allegedly acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems,” reports The Verge.

“When ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of plaintiffs’ copyrighted works — something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,” the lawsuit claimed.

The lawsuit alleged that chatbot never bothered to “reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”

In a separate lawsuit against Meta, it alleged the authors’ books were accessible in datasets Meta used to train its LLaMA models.

“Many of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books appear in the dataset that Meta has admitted to using to train LLaMA,” it read.

Silverman owns a registered copyright in one book, called The Bedwetter while Golden owns registered copyrights in several books, including Ararat.  Kadrey owns registered copyrights in several books, including ‘Sandman Slim’.

In both lawsuits, the authors said that they “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material” for the companies’ AI models.

Each lawsuit contains six counts of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition.

The authors are looking for statutory damages, restitution of profits, and more. Meta or OpenAI did not comment on the lawsuits.

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems”.

ALSO READ-OpenAI, Meta sued by top US authors

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OpenAI, Meta sued by top US authors

In a separate lawsuit against Meta, it alleged the authors’ books were accessible in datasets Meta used to train its LLaMA models….reports Asian Lite News

Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued Sam Altman-run OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta over dual claims of copyright infringement.

The lawsuits alleged that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA (a set of large language models) were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works.

Their works were allegedly acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems,” reports The Verge.

“When ChatGPT is prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of plaintiffs’ copyrighted works — something only possible if ChatGPT was trained on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works,” the lawsuit claimed.

The lawsuit alleged that chatbot never bothered to “reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works.”

Facebook meta.(photo:Pixabay.com)

In a separate lawsuit against Meta, it alleged the authors’ books were accessible in datasets Meta used to train its LLaMA models.

“Many of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted books appear in the dataset that Meta has admitted to using to train LLaMA,” it read.

Silverman owns a registered copyright in one book, called The Bedwetter while Golden owns registered copyrights in several books, including Ararat. 

Kadrey owns registered copyrights in several books, including ‘Sandman Slim’. 

In both lawsuits, the authors said that they “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material” for the companies’ AI models. 

Each lawsuit contains six counts of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. 

The authors are looking for statutory damages, restitution of profits, and more.

Meta or OpenAI did not comment on the lawsuits.

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems”.

ALSO READ: Meta overhauls Facebook fact-check controls for US users

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Tech Lite

Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting IG account

Even if they capture just a fraction of the Instagram user base, as little as a quarter, Threads could rival Twitter in audience size…reports Asian Lite News

Meta’s Twitter rival Threads, that amassed more than 1 crore users in a span of just seven hours, will not let you delete the account as once you try to remove Threads, you will also lose your Instagram account.

In a ‘Supplemental Privacy Policy,’ Meta said that “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”

According to the social network, a Threads profile is an integral part of the user’s Instagram account. Instagram currently has more than 2 billion users globally and Threads, touted as a ‘Twitter killer’ is available in 100 countries, including in India, is billed as the next Twitter killer.

“Threads app stands out from other Twitter challengers by tapping into a ready user base potentially migrating from Instagram on Day Zero. With Mark Zuckerberg’s proven execution skills, Threads has the potential to become a breakthrough alternative to Twitter,” Prabhu Ram, head of Industry Intelligence Group (IIG) at CyberMedia Research (CMR), told.

Even if they capture just a fraction of the Instagram user base, as little as a quarter, Threads could rival Twitter in audience size.

“While focusing on user growth initially, Threads is poised to attract advertisers as its user base expands,” said Ram. Some top brands like Netflix, Amazon, NFL and Pepsi have expressed their vote of confidence in Threads by signing up to the app, according to reports.

Similar to Instagram, with Threads, users can follow and connect with friends and creators who share their interests, including the people they follow on Instagram.

Moreover, users under 16 (or under 18 in certain countries) will be defaulted into a private profile when they join the app. Users can also control who can mention them or reply to them within Threads. Like on Instagram, users can add hidden words to filter out replies to their threads that contain specific words. They can also unfollow, block, restrict or report a profile on Threads by tapping the three-dot menu, and any accounts they have blocked on Instagram will automatically be blocked on Threads.

ALSO READ-Meta’s Twitter competitor ‘Threads’ arrives on web

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Meta overhauls Facebook fact-check controls for US users

Facebook meta.(photo:Pixabay.com)

This move, according to the platform, aims to provide users with more power over its algorithm….reports Asian Lite News

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has made a significant move by giving US users control over fact-checked content.

This move, according to the platform, aims to provide users with more power over its algorithm. However, some analysts argue that it could benefit purveyors of misinformation, AFP reported.

Previously, Facebook’s algorithm automatically downranked flagged posts, reducing the visibility of false or misleading content. Now, with the new “content reduced by fact-checking” option in settings, users can choose to make debunked posts appear higher or lower in their feed.

They can also maintain the status quo. The option “reduce more” makes fact-checked posts less visible, potentially moving them even lower or out of the feed entirely. Conversely, the “don’t reduce” option boosts the visibility of such content.

Meta stated that this update is a response to users’ desire for greater control over their feed. The fact-checking option was rolled out in May, with users discovering it in the settings.

This development takes place against the backdrop of a politically polarized climate in the US, where content moderation on social media platforms has become a contentious issue.

Conservative advocates claim that the government has coerced or colluded with platforms like Facebook and Twitter to censor or suppress right-leaning content under the pretense of fact-checking.

ALSO READ: US lawmakers call for safety of Indian diplomats