Latest AI News
Meta wants its AI glasses to seem less creepy. Its AI strategy says otherwise.
Meta’s AI glasses have a growing reputation as acreepy technology. The company hopes to change that opinion by announcing an update that will disable the camera if the LED light that indicates the glasses are recording has been tampered with. The move is seemingly a concession toconsumersentimentthat the glasses aren’t just fun, fashionable accessories, happily promoted by Kylie Jenner, but have serious implications for consumer privacy: They can be abused as surveillance devices. Yet, even as Meta touts the new safeguard this week, the company is also pushing products and features that ask users to surrender more of their privacy to the company. Whether that’straining its AI on your images,enabling AI features using your personal contentunless you opt out, or exploring ways tocontinuously recordor usebiometric facial recognition, Meta’s vision of the future seems to always depend on collecting more of your personal data. In itsblog postabout the new camera safety feature, the company pats itself on the back, noting that “no other kind of camera has done this and we’re proud to lead the industry effort.” However, Meta also admits that the move was necessary because some people had been using tape to cover the LED light, which had already forced Meta to adapt its tech to disable recording when the LED is blocked. Determined, those same AI glasses creeps would then use “sophisticated efforts to modify or destroy the capture LED,” Meta’s announcement explains. In other words, Meta is confirming that some people who use AI glasses have hidden agendas — namely a desire to record situations or people (oftenwomen) without their consent. Despite this, the company is reportedly testing a prototype of AI glasses that would “continuously collect audio while taking photos every few seconds,” sources recently toldFinancial Times. Meta’s blog post about the glasses feature attempts to assuage people’s fears about the devices’ privacy by answering questions like “who can see the photos and videos I take on my glasses?” Meta answers by promising, “You, and only you — unless you choose to share them.” Yet, Meta’sprivacy policyhas explained that any image you share with Meta AIcan be used to train its AI. All the while, the company is facing multipleinvestigationsandlawsuitsover Meta AI glasses privacy violations.One lawsuit comes afterMeta notably canceled a contract with an outsourced tech firm after some of its Kenyan workers alleged they had to view graphic content, likesex, nudity, and people using the toilet, while training Meta’s AI using people’s Meta AI glasses’ videos. These are hardly Meta’s first scrapes with privacy violations or safety measures, either. Arguably, Meta’s reputation on privacy has been tainted for years afternumerousleaksand lost lawsuitsaboutits alleged lack of child safety measuresanddesire for growth at all costs. There arebooks by whistleblowersdocumenting its allegedabuses, not to mention previous large-scale privacy disasters, likethe Cambridge Analytica data scandalandothers. After the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, Meta now insists on itsPrivacy Progress Update page, “Since 2019, we’ve invested significantly in people, products, and technology to continue to evolve our rigorous privacy program.” Still, the company plows forward with what many people would consider privacy-violating ideas. Case in point: On the same day it announced the Meta glasses’ new safeguard, it shared thatMeta AI can now use anyone’s public Instagram photosto make AI images,unless you opt out. It also built features touse Meta AI on images in your Camera Roll you’ve never sharedand implemented suchpoor privacy controlsin its Meta AI app, leading users to essentially dox themselves byrevealing their embarrassing searches. This is the same company thatApple wouldn’t partner with due to privacy concerns, thatrecords its employees’ keystrokes to train its AI, and thatplans to sell targeted ads based on data in your AI chats. So, while an LED safeguard on AI glasses might be a necessary feature, consumers clearly still have many reasons to remain distrustful of how social media will use their images and data, especially in its broader AI plans.
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Why this CEO thinks video games make better training data than the internet
Loading the player… When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they’re less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That’s the bet behind General Intuition, a Bezos-backed, New York-based startupvalued at $2.3 billion that just closed a $320 million roundwith Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers at MIT and Google DeepMind joining its list of investors. On this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast, General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte joins Rebecca Bellan to dig into why world models trained on gaming data might be the next big leap in physical AI, how the company spun out of gaming platform Medal TV, and where the ethical red lines are when your models could end up being used for defense applications. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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Google Photos adds a new AI ‘Video Remix’ tool
Google Photos is getting a new “Video Remix” feature that can edit and transform videos in seconds, Googleannouncedon Wednesday. The feature is powered byGemini Omni,Google’s recently released model that promises to “create anything from any input.” The launch is Google’s latest push to bring more generative AI tools into its consumer apps as it continues to compete with companies like Apple, OpenAI, and Adobe. By baking AI-powered video editing into Google Photos, the tech giant is making it easier for users to edit clips with a few taps instead of relying on dedicated software, giving users another reason to stay within Google’s ecosystem. The Video Remix tool can be accessed in the “Create” tab in Google Photos, allowing you to do things like apply cinematic relighting to brighten up a dark clip, swap out a plain background for something else, or add artistic styles to videos, such as watercolor, raw sketchbook, and oil painting effects. For example, you could edit a video to make it appear that you shot it in a greenhouse, relight a video with a morning glow, or paint a video in a watercolor effect. “Creating beautiful video clips shouldn’t require professional skills or hours of editing,” Google wrote in the blog post. “Now, with Video Remix in Google Photos, you can transform ordinary videos into share-worthy moments in just a few taps.” Video Remix starts rolling out today to eligible Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers in the U.S., Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, and Turkey. The feature is the latest in a series of AI-powered updates introduced to Google Photos. The app recently launchednew touch-up toolsto allow users to apply subtle edits and fixes, such as removing blemishes, refining skin texture, brightening eyes, and whitening teeth. Google also announcedan AI-powered featurethat turns photos of your clothes into a digital closet where you can create new outfit ideas and virtually try on outfits.
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Meta's Muse Image Uses Content From Public Instagram Accounts for AI-Generated Images
Meta has introduced Muse Image, its first image generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside a new feature that allows users to generate AI images using public Instagram photos unless account owners choose to opt out. The model is rolling out across Meta AI, Instagram and WhatsApp, and lets users tag public Instagram accounts to incorporate publicly available photos into AI-generated visuals. Meta says Instagram users can disable the feature through their account settings if they do not want their public content to be used.
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Former OpenAI exec Kevin Weil is now on the board of Stoke Space
Kevin Weil, a veteran tech executive known for stints at Twitter, Meta, Planet Labs, and OpenAI, has joined the board ofStoke Space, a well-funded Seattle startup building reusable rockets to compete with SpaceX. “It’s real simple for me,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told TechCrunch of meeting Weil when he co-founded Stoke in 2020 and soon after joined Y Combinator’swinter batch. “I came out of engineering, started a company, had no idea how to fundraise. I had no idea how Silicon Valley worked. I had no network. Kevin [an early investor in the company with his wife Elizabeth, through their fundScribble Ventures] comes with all of that background and was able to help me think about fundraising and getting the company off the ground. The two kept talking while Lapsa raised $1.34 billion — including a$510 million Series Dfunding round in 2025 — to build a rapidly reusable rocket that could fly this year. Now, the time is apparently right for Weil to join the board as a director to help continue scaling the company. Stoke declined to make Weil available for an interview, and he didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s outreach. Weil’s past work has focused on digital products and platforms, which aren’t obviously on Stoke’s roadmap. He was most recently the head of OpenAI’s efforts to accelerate scientific research,leaving the companyafter that program’s work was spread more widely across the frontier lab in April. He had previously served as OpenAI’s chief product officer from June 2024 until October 2025. Weil’s last job raises one obvious question: OpenAI’s Sam Altman wasreportedlykicking the tires on Stoke last year, contemplating an investment in his own SpaceX competitor. Could Weil be the link between the frontier AI lab and a possible partner in space? Lapsa declined to comment on “gossip and rumors” about OpenAI, saying Weil’s role was to focus on Stoke itself. Stoke is building a rocket, Nova, that is intended to be completely reusable and can be flown again and again. No one has ever done that, with SpaceX coming the closest with its enormous Starship rocket. The technological challenges of reusing a rocket — particularly its ability to survive the extreme heat of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere from space — deterred even space investors with the deepest pockets. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, where Lapsa once worked, has flirted with the approach, but hasn’t prioritized it. Now, though, SpaceX’s blockbuster stock market debut — with much of its value resting onElon Musk’s promisesthat Starship will be flying operational missions this year — has proven Lapsa’s foresight. Despite many billions of dollars invested in new launch vehicles, there aren’t enough rockets to go around, and the next company to get a reasonably priced rocket flying regularly promises to make a killing. “The world is realizing that launch is still not solved,” Lapsa said. “The idea of full, rapid reuse was a little bit out there at that time…that’s now been rather normalized, and people see the inevitable now.” Notably, the idea of building distributed data centers in space to leverage solar power and escape political restrictions on Earth has captured the imagination of some venture capitalists. The key obstacle there is the cost of getting all those computer chips into orbit. Space data centers “really only make sense with full rapid reuse,” Lapsa said, which could be a key differentiator for Stoke as its rocket starts flying. Military contracts will also be key to the company’s success, and Weil has experience bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and the Department of Defense; he was one offour tech movers and shakerswho joined the U.S. Army Reserve in a bid to improve recruitment and cooperation between the Army and industry. And this isn’t his first time in the space business. Weil served as the president of Planet Labs, a satellite earth observation company, for three years as it went public 2021. Whatever Weil can add to the company’s strategy as it closes in on delivering an operational launch vehicle, though, the company has to execute. “We’ve got a good chunk of the risk behind us, we’ve got more to go,” Lapsa said. “We’ll work as hard as we can, and we’ll go when it’s ready.”
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Ford Opens Coimbatore GCC to Strengthen Business Continuity Operations
The new 800-seat facility will support finance and business functions while tapping Coimbatore’s talent pool.
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Enterprises Have an AI Pilot Problem. The Solution May Be Neurosymbolic AI
As AI pilots struggle to reach production across enterprise environments, one supply chain technology company is betting on combining neural AI with older, structured forms of reasoning.
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US Insurance Giant Nationwide Opens 1st International GCC in Hyderabad
The expansion comes as the company enters its 100th year of operations.
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Sarvam AI Opens Hiring for Forward Deployed Engineers
The company wants engineers who can take AI systems from design to production while working directly with enterprise customers.
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Will Uttar Pradesh's GCC Ambitions Have a Hard Stop at Noida?
Uttar Pradesh has an advantage when it comes to professionals looking to return closer to home later in their careers.
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Indian IT Braces for Soft Start to FY27 as AI Margins Remain a Mirage
Analysts expect a muted start to FY27 as Indian IT’s enterprise spending remains cautious, while AI is yet to generate meaningful high-margin revenues.
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Ex. GitHub CEO’s Startup Launches ‘Fastest’ Git Hosting Network
Entire says its distributed Git network sustained 570,000 repository clones per hour and 2.1 million Git pushes per hour in early testing, targeting AI coding agents that generate heavy concurrent Git traffic.
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