ADVERTISING

Meta to use AI to inform ads, content

Meta will soon use your AI chats to inform your scrolling. 

The social media giant announced on Wednesday that it will start personalizing ads and content recommendations using user interactions with its generative AI features. Users will be notified starting October 7, before this change goes into effect in mid-December. This policy won’t apply to users in South Korea, the U.K. and the E.U. due to privacy laws in those regions.

To keep your ads from devolving into the Thanksgiving dinner table, Meta noted that topics like “religious views, sexual orientation, political views, health, racial or ethnic origin, philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership,” discussed with its AI bots, won’t be used in ad algorithms. 

Meta claimed that its AI products garner more than 1 billion users monthly. Meta AI users will not have the option to opt out, the company confirmed. 

A move like this is par for the course for Meta, which already relies on user interactions to hone its ad experiences and content algorithms. “Soon, interactions with AIs will be another signal we use to improve people’s experience,” the company said in its announcement. 

With this move, Meta is operating by the same playbook that it always has: utilizing every tool at its disposal to target advertising to a T, and thereby rake in as much cash as possible. In the most recent quarter, the company’s ad revenue totaled nearly $46.6 billion, representing an increase of over 18% from the same quarter in the previous year.

With fears of an AI bubble creeping in, the stakes are growing higher. Companies are investing billions in developing massive AI models, with little evidence of return on investment. Meta noted in its July earnings call that its expenses are expected to range between $114 billion and $118 billion for 2025 and increase above this for 2026, primarily due to investments in AI. 

This isn’t the first time Meta has sought to incorporate AI into its digital ad playbook. The company began rolling out some generative features in its Ads Manager back in 2023, and said this past summer that it’s working on an AI tool to create entire ad campaigns from scratch. Still, it’s unclear whether these additions will be fruitful enough to make these models worth the price tag.

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SOCIAL MEDIA

OpenAI’s Sora app goes after TikTok, Meta

We’ve come a long way from Will Smith eating spaghetti. 

On Tuesday, OpenAI debuted its second-generation Sora video model, which the company has called “the GPT‑3.5 moment for video,” with improved world simulation capabilities, a better understanding of physics and more user controllability. 

Alongside the launch of Sora 2 came the Sora app, a social media platform designed for users to create and share AI-generated videos, potentially challenging TikTok’s dominance in short-form video. In addition to creating entirely AI-generated content, the app has a cameo feature that allows users to cast themselves and their friends in their AI creations.

The launch comes just days after the debut of Meta’s Vibes, a short-form AI video app that has been widely criticized for hocking AI slop. While Sora is currently invite-only, the user response has been kinder, at least so far.  

“It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed,” CEO Sam Altman said on his personal blog. “The team has put great care and thought into trying to figure out how to make a delightful product that doesn’t fall into that trap.” 

However, while CEO Sam Altman said on his personal blog that creativity is on the verge of a “cambrian explosion,” Sora so far has been the birthplace of quite a few dupes. 

Reporter Alex Heath said in his newsletter that while he wasn’t able to render “Superman” when prompted, he created a lookalike with the prompt “flying superhero with a red cape.” A Twitter user was also able to create a Hamilton rip-off in Sora. 

Altman noted in his blog that one of the “mitigations” in the Sora app is deepfake and likeness misuse prevention. However, as several AI companies face legal battles with artists and creators over copyright infringement, these new and improved video models could add fuel to the fire.

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AGENTIC AI

CEOs are all in on agents

The C-suite is ready for agentic AI. 

A study published on Thursday by the International Data Corporation, in partnership with Salesforce, found that CEOs are overwhelmingly bullish on implementing “digital labor” into their workforces, with 99% of more than 150 surveyed saying they’re prepared for the transformation. 

These CEOs, who were all from organizations ranging from 100 to 10,000 employees, see agents as a key part of this vision: 

• 65% said they are looking at AI agents as a means of transforming their business models entirely, and 73% said that digital labor would transform their company’s structure. 

• 72% of respondents believe that most employees will have an AI agent reporting to them in the next five years, and 57% of CEOs reported that digital labor would increase the need for workers in leadership roles. 

• Some of the departments that CEOs expect to see the most impact include security, software development and customer service. 

Given the nascent nature of this technology, the fact that so many CEOs are sold on agentic AI is “striking,” said Alan Webber, research director at IDC. “They're looking at AI agents to reshape their business, to redo what it is they do, reform workflows and business processes.” 

With this massive transformation, 80% of CEOs report that the future of work involves humans and agents coexisting, rather than complete displacement of jobs, with a projected 4 in 5 employees either remaining in their current roles or redeployed to new ones, according to the report. 

While that theoretical figure still leaves 20% of workers out of luck, Webber noted that there are many roles where the impact of shifting to an “agentic enterprise” is still unknown. For example, Webber said, with the rise of AI-powered coding agents handling development, “we don't know exactly what that augmentation and what the human role there looks like yet.”

LINKS

• Intel is in talks with AMD to manufacture chips for its foundry 

• Microsoft sales chief Judson Althoff to head the company’s commercial business

• Apple axes plan to revamp Vision Pro into AI glasses

• Peloton unveiled a sweeping relaunch with AI at the core 

• Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab debuts automated AI creation tool

• Microsoft folds AI subscription service into Office suite

• Agentforce Vibes: Salesforce’s enterprise-grade vibe coding platform that assists developers through every step of building software. 

• Microsoft Agent Framework: An agent orchestration platform, consolidating AI workloads into one software development kit.

• Cursor i.7: The latest update from coding platform Cursor, with agentic autocomplete, customizable agent behavior and rules applied across all projects.

• Verdent Deck: This multi-agent coding platform can handle multiple development tasks simultaneously.

• Cognitia: An AI tool that learns your habits and adapts to your workflows.

• Korey: An AI agent for product management and engineering teams.

• Scale AI: Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise GenAI

• xAI: Mission Manager, Government

• LinkedIn: Senior AI Engineer

• IBM: AI Development Manager

GAMES

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