Meta AI
Meta is making the biggest AI bet in its history — spending more per day on infrastructure than most companies spend in a year. At the same time, it is cutting thousands of jobs. Llama, Ray-Ban glasses, Meta AI: Zuckerberg's vision of an open-source AI future is ambitious, expensive and deeply controversial. We cover all of it.
Meta Just Made Your Face Raw Material for Anyone’s AI — and Opted You In by Default.
Meta launched Muse Image on July 9 — a feature inside Meta AI that lets any user @-tag a public Instagram account and generate an AI image using that person’s likeness, with no notice and no consent, because public accounts are opted in by default. SAG-AFTRA, Public Citizen and top talent agencies condemned it within a day. Meta points to an invisible AI watermark and an opt-out toggle. But in Europe, an opt-out-by-default model collides directly with the GDPR’s consent requirements and the EU AI Act’s transparency rules. gafam.ai reads the European reckoning.
Two Messages, One Room: Meta’s $145 Billion AI Bet Just Wobbled in Public
At an internal town hall on July 2, Mark Zuckerberg told staff Meta’s AI agent work “hasn’t accelerated in the way we expected,” and the restructuring behind 8,000 layoffs “hasn’t come to fruition yet.” Minutes later, AI chief Alexandr Wang told the same room that Meta’s next model, “Watermelon,” has caught up with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 — using an order of magnitude more compute. Two messages, one room, and Meta’s $145 billion AI question sitting between them. gafam.ai reads the contradiction — and the European lesson inside it.
Meta Just Banned Its Own Engineers From the Best AI Coding Tools. The Reason Is Revealing.
Internal Meta documents reviewed by The Information reveal that the company has restricted its engineers from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex — and even paused some tasks entirely. The reason is not cost. It is fear of “distillation”: that outputs from rival models could seep into Meta’s own training data and contaminate its Llama models, triggering what an internal memo called “serious escalations with partner companies.” It is a rare, revealing glimpse into how zero-sum the frontier AI race has become. gafam.ai’s European analysis.
Meta Abandons Open Source — Muse Spark Is Its First Secret AI Model
Meta has launched Muse Spark — its first flagship large language model built entirely in secret, under Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs. It is a closed, proprietary model — a direct departure from the open-source Llama strategy that Meta has championed since 2023. Muse Spark delivers competitive performance on multimodal perception, reasoning and agentic tasks at a fraction of the compute cost of Llama 4. The open-source era at Meta may be ending.
Meta and Google Just Became Unlikely Partners — on Android
Google and Meta — two companies competing directly in AI, advertising and social media — have quietly become collaborators on Android. Instagram is now fully optimised for Android tablets. AI-powered Instagram editing tools including video upscaling, night sight and audio separation have landed on Android. And Instagram Edits for Android is getting a major AI upgrade. In the AI arms race, even rivals find reasons to cooperate. gafam.ai examines what this unlikely partnership reveals about the future of the GAFAM landscape. Published by gafam.ai — The European Eye on Big Tech & Artificial Intelligence.