Meta keeps trying to invent the future. It hasn't worked yet
A new Meta team is working on robots capable of doing household tasks, Bloomberg reported Friday. But the broader goal, according to the report, is to create a platform that other companies can use to build their robots – a feat that would make Meta a critical part of the robotics industry.
And Meta needs that kind of win. While its social media apps have proven to be wildly popular, it lost the race to control the devices you actually use those apps on – namely phones. Apple and Google quickly dominated the smartphone landscape in the early 2000s, leaving little room for anyone else, including Meta, to compete.
Now, Meta is seemingly trying to make sure it doesn't miss out again. Over the last half-decade, it's made an aggressive push into artificial intelligence and the metaverse to get ahead of whatever the next big thing may be – and to escape Facebook's shadow. An expansion into robotics would be a big step toward that goal.
But the company will face competition. Tesla flaunted its humanoid Optimus robot at last year's Cybercab launch event, and chipmaker Nvidia announced new AI tech designed to power robots at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
A Meta spokesperson did not respond to CNN's request for comment.
Meta's biggest effort to move beyond Facebook came in 2021 when it rebranded itself as Meta to orient the company around the 'metaverse,' a broad term for digital communal spaces typically in virtual reality.
It was a statement that Meta is far more than just a social media app, but a platform that would help define the next era of computing.
'We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it's the next chapter for our company too,' the company said in its 2021 founder's letter, signed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Still, nearly half a decade later, the metaverse remains niche, unlike the ubiquitous smartphone.
Just 7.7 million mixed reality headsets are expected to ship globally in 2025, according to market research firm the International Data Corporation (IDC), compared to the 331.7 million smartphones estimated to have shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone. Still, Meta is by far the headset leader, with the IDC reporting that it accounts for nearly 71% of the market.
Meta's previous efforts to branch out from social media didn't resonate broadly with consumers.
In 2013 it launched a Facebook-branded phone in partnership with Taiwanese tech company HTC, once a major player in the Android phone market. But shortly after its release, AT&T dropped the device's price down to just $0.99 in what was an unmistakable sign of poor sales – and perhaps an indication that consumers didn't want more Facebook on their phone other than in its app.
Meta also tried to get in on the smart home business with a video calling device called the Meta Portal (initially Facebook Portal), which in launched in 2018 but has since been discontinued.
But Meta's latest expansion into consumer hardware with its Ray-Ban smart glasses shows promise. Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica said in its 2024 earnings release on February 12 that it has sold two million pairs of the glasses since their 2023 debut.
That number is small in the context of well-established devices like smartphones, and even in the world of virtual reality headsets. But smart glasses are still a very new category, leaving plenty of potential opportunity for Meta.
That's if it can fend off upcoming competition from Google and Samsung, which announced a new version of Android for mixed reality headsets and smart glasses in December, hoping to replicate the success they've experienced in the mobile industry.
Meta's ambitions with humanoid robots may be slightly different, according to Bloomberg's report. While the company may consider making a Meta-branded home robot, the primary ambition would be to create a platform for robots – much like how Android is a platform that powers phones.
It's all part of Meta's mission to make the name 'Meta' mean something other than just social media apps.
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Time Business News
2 hours ago
- Time Business News
Japan used to be a tech giant. Why is it stuck with fax machines and ink stamps?
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The Walkman and games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. were brought to the world by Japan. But that changed by the turn of the century with the rise of computers and the internet. Why Japan Fell Behind in the Digital Age: According to Daisuke Kawai, director of the University of Tokyo's Economic Security and Policy Innovation Program, 'Japan, with its strengths in hardware, was slow to adapt to software and services' as the world moved toward software-driven economies. He said that a variety of things made the problem worse. As Japan's electronics industry declined, engineers fled to foreign firms as a result of the country's inadequate investment in ICT. As a result, the government lacked skilled tech workers and had low digital literacy. Public services were never properly modernized and remained reliant on paper documents and hand-carved, personalized seals called hanko that are used for identity verification. Over time, various ministries and agencies adopted their own patchwork IT strategies, but there was never a unified government push. There were cultural factors, too. Kawai stated, 'Japanese companies are known for their risk-averse culture, seniority-based… hierarchical system, and a slow, consensus-driven decision-making process that hampered innovation.' And thanks to Japan's plummeting birthrate, it has far more old people than young people. According to Kawai, this large proportion of elderly people had 'relatively little demand or pressure for digital services' and a greater skepticism regarding new technologies and digital fraud. Japan's Digital Transformation: From Fax Machines to the Future Jonathan Coopersmith, emeritus professor of history at Texas A&M University, stated that apathy was widespread. Small businesses and individuals didn't feel compelled to switch from fax machines to computers: Why buy expensive new machinery and learn how to use it, when fax worked fine and everybody in Japan used it anyway? A possible switch would have been too disruptive to everyday services, according to larger businesses and institutions like banks and hospitals. Coopersmith, who wrote a book about the fax machine in 2015 and wrote about Japan's relationship with it, stated, 'The bigger you are, the harder it is to change, especially software.' Additionally, it posed a legal problem. Any new technology necessitates new laws, as demonstrated by the introduction of electric scooters into the road or the attempts made by nations around the world to legislate against deepfakes and AI copyright following the AI boom. Digitizing Japan would have required changing thousands of regulations, Coopersmith estimates – and lawmakers simply had no incentive to do so. After all, digitization isn't necessarily a major factor in voter turnout in elections. 'Why do I want to become part of the digital world if I don't need to?' was how he summed it up. A hanko is stamped on a banking document in an arranged photograph taken in Tokyo, Japan A global pandemic was ultimately necessary to bring about change. Japan's technological gap became evident as national and local authorities became overwhelmed, without the digital tools to streamline their processes. Japan's health ministry launched an online portal for hospitals to report cases instead of handwritten faxes, phone calls, or emails in May 2020, months after the virus began to spread worldwide. And even then, hiccups persisted. Public broadcaster NHK reported that a contact tracing app had a system error that lasted for months but didn't let people know they might be exposed. Many had never used file-sharing services or video tools like Zoom before, making it difficult for them to adjust to working and attending school remotely. In one mind-boggling case in 2022, a Japanese town accidentally wired the entirety of its Covid relief fund – about 46.3 million yen ($322,000) – to just one man's bank account. The confusion stemmed from the bank being given both a floppy disk of information and a paper request form – but by the time authorities realized their error, the man had already gambled away most of the funds, according to NHK. For anyone under 35, a floppy disk is a magnetic memory strip encased in plastic that is physically inserted into a computer. Each one typically stores up to 1.44 MB of data, which is less than the size of an average iPhone photo. The situation became so bad that Takuya Hirai, who would become the country's Minister of Digital Transformation in 2021, once referred to the country's response to the pandemic as a 'digital defeat.' According to Coopersmith, a 'combination of fear and opportunity' led to the birth of the Digital Agency, a division tasked with bringing Japan up to speed. Created in 2021, it launched a series of initiatives including rolling out a smart version of Japan's social security card and pushing for more cloud-based infrastructure. Last July, the Digital Agency finally declared victory in its 'war on floppy disks,' eliminating the disks across all government systems – a mammoth effort that required scrapping more than 1,000 regulations governing their use. But there were growing pains, too. Local media reported that the government once asked the public for their thoughts on the metaverse through a complicated process that required downloading an Excel spreadsheet, entering your information, and sending the document back to the ministry via email. 'The (ministry) will respond properly using an (online) form from now on,' wrote then-Digital Minister Taro Kono on Twitter following the move's social media backlash. Digitization as 'a way to survive' According to Kawai, businesses rushed to follow the government's lead, hiring consultants and contractors to assist in system overhauls. Consultant Masahiro Goto is one example. He has assisted large Japanese companies in all sectors in adapting to the digital world as part of the digital transformation team at the Nomura Research Institute (NRI), designing new business models and implementing new internal systems. He stated to CNN that these clients frequently 'are eager to move forward, but they're unsure how to go about it.' 'Many are still using old systems that require a lot of maintenance, or systems that are approaching end-of-service life. In many cases, that's when they reach out to us for help.' According to Goto, the number of businesses seeking the services of NRI consultants 'has definitely been rising year by year,' particularly over the past five years. As a result, the NRI consultants are in high demand. And for good reason: for years, Japanese companies outsourced their IT needs, meaning they now lack the in-house skills to fully digitize. A sign for cashless payments outside a shop in the trendy Omotesando district of Tokyo. He stated, 'Fundamentally, they want to improve the efficiency of their operations, and I believe they want to actively adopt digital technologies as a means of survival.' 'In the end, Japan's population will continue to fall, so increasing productivity is essential.' According to local media, the Digital Agency's plan to eliminate fax machines within the government received 400 formal objections from various ministries in 2021. There may be resistance in certain pockets. Things like the hanko seal – which are rooted in tradition and custom, and which some parents gift to their children when they come of age – may be harder to phase out given their cultural significance. According to Kawai, the rate of progress is also influenced by the Digital Agency's willingness to push for regulatory reform and the degree to which lawmakers will give digitization top priority when creating future budgets. Additionally, new technologies are advancing rapidly in other regions of the world, and Japan is playing catch-up with shifting targets. Coopersmith stated, 'This is going to be an ongoing challenge because the digital technologies of 2025 will be different from those of 2030, 2035.' But experts are optimistic. Kawai projects that Japan could catch up to some Western peers in five to ten years at this rate. Finally, there is a public demand for it, as more and more businesses are offering new online services and accepting cashless payments. 'People are generally eager to digitize for sure,' said Kawai. 'I'm sure that young people, or the general public, prefer to digitize as fast as possible.' Blogger Profile: Name: Usama Arshad Website link: TIME BUSINESS NEWS
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2 hours ago
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Alternate Approaches To AI Safeguards: Meta Versus Anthropic
As companies rush to deploy and ultimately monetize AI, a divide has emerged between those prioritizing engagement metrics and those building safety into their core architecture. Recent revelations about Meta's internal AI guidelines paint a disturbing picture that stands in direct opposition to Anthropic's methodical safety framework. Meta's Leaked Lenient AI Guidelines Internal documents obtained by Reuters exposed Meta's AI guidelines that shocked child safety advocates and lawmakers. The 200-page document titled "GenAI: Content Risk Standards" revealed policies that permitted chatbots to engage in "romantic or sensual" conversations with children as young as 13, even about guiding them into the bedroom. The guidelines, approved by Meta's legal, public policy, and engineering teams, including its chief ethicist, allow AI to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that "every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply." In addition to inappropriate interactions with minors, Meta's policies also exhibited troubling permissiveness in other areas. The policy explicitly stated that its AI would be allowed to generate demonstrably false medical information, telling users that Stage 4 colon cancer "is typically treated by poking the stomach with healing quartz crystals." While direct hate speech was prohibited, the system could help users argue that "Black people are dumber than white people" as long as it was framed as an argument rather than a direct statement. The violence policies revealed equally concerning standards. Meta's guidelines declared that depicting adults, including the elderly, receiving punches or kicks was acceptable. For children, the system could generate images of "kids fighting" showing a boy punching a girl in the face, though it drew the line at graphic gore. When asked to generate an image of "man disemboweling a woman," the AI would deflect to showing a chainsaw-threat scene instead of actual disembowelment. Yes, these examples were explicitly included in the policy. For celebrity images, the guidelines showed creative workarounds that missed the point entirely. While rejecting requests for "Taylor Swift completely naked," the system would respond to "Taylor Swift topless, covering her breasts with her hands" by generating an image of the pop star holding "an enormous fish" to her chest. This approach treated serious concerns about non-consensual sexualized imagery as a technical challenge to be cleverly circumvented rather than establishing ethical foul lines. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed that after Reuters raised questions, the company removed provisions allowing romantic engagement with children, calling them "erroneous and inconsistent with our policies." However, Stone acknowledged enforcement had been inconsistent, and Meta declined to provide the updated policy document or address other problematic guidelines that remain unchanged. Ironically, just as Meta's own guidelines explicitly allowed for sexual innuendos with thirteen-year-olds, Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer at Meta, stated, 'Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI.' This was in response to criticism about Meta refusing to sign onto the EU AI Act's General-Purpose AI Code of Practice due to 'legal uncertainties.' Note: Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and OpenAI, among others, are act signatories. Anthropic's Public Blueprint for Responsible AI While Meta scrambled to remove its most egregious policies after public exposure, Anthropic, the maker of has been building safety considerations into its AI development process from day one. Anthropic is not without its own ethical and legal challenges regarding the scanning of books to train its system. However, the company's Constitutional AI framework represents a fundamentally different interaction philosophy than Meta's, one that treats safety not as a compliance checkbox but as a trenchant design principle. Constitutional AI works by training models to follow a set of explicit principles rather than relying solely on pattern matching from training data. The system operates in two phases. First, during supervised learning, the AI critiques and revises its own responses based on constitutional principles. The model learns to identify when its outputs might violate these principles and automatically generates improved versions. Second, during reinforcement learning, the system uses AI-generated preferences based on constitutional principles to further refine its behavior. The principles themselves draw from diverse sources including the UN Declaration of Human Rights, trust and safety best practices from major platforms, and insights from cross-cultural perspectives. Sample principles include directives to avoid content that could be used to harm children, refuse assistance with illegal activities, and maintain appropriate boundaries in all interactions. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on human reviewers to label harmful content after the fact, Constitutional AI builds these considerations directly into the model's decision-making process. Anthropic has also pioneered transparency in AI development. The company publishes detailed papers on its safety techniques, shares its constitutional principles publicly, and actively collaborates with the broader AI safety community. Regular "red team" exercises test the system's boundaries, with security experts attempting to generate harmful outputs. These findings feed back into system improvements, creating an ongoing safety enhancement cycle. For organizations looking to implement similar safeguards, Anthropic's approach offers concrete lessons: When AI Goes Awry: Cautionary Tales Abound Meta's guidelines represent just one example in a growing catalog of AI safety failures across industries. The ongoing class-action lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare illuminates what happens when companies deploy AI without adequate oversight. The insurance giant allegedly used an algorithm to systematically deny medically necessary care to elderly patients, despite internal knowledge that the system had a 90% error rate. Court documents indicated the company continued using the flawed system because executives knew only 0.2% of patients would appeal denied claims. Recent analysis of high-profile AI failures highlights similar patterns across sectors. The Los Angeles Times faced backlash when its AI-powered "Insights" feature generated content that appeared to downplay the Ku Klux Klan's violent history, describing it as a "white Protestant culture responding to societal changes" rather than acknowledging its role as a terrorist organization. The incident forced the newspaper to deactivate the AI app after widespread criticism. In the legal profession, a Stanford professor's expert testimony in a case involving Minnesota's deepfake election laws included AI-generated citations for studies that didn't exist. This embarrassing revelation underscored how even experts can fall victim to AI's confident-sounding fabrications when proper verification processes aren't in place. These failures share common elements: prioritizing efficiency over accuracy, inadequate human oversight, and treating AI deployment as a technical rather than ethical challenge. Each represents moving too quickly to implement AI capabilities without building or heeding corresponding safety guardrails. Building Ethical AI Infrastructure The contrast between Meta and Anthropic highlights additional AI safety considerations and decisions for any organization to confront. Traditional governance structures can prove inadequate when applied to AI systems. Meta's guidelines received approval from its chief ethicist and legal teams, yet still contained provisions that horrified child safety advocates. This suggests organizations need dedicated AI ethics boards with diverse perspectives, including child development experts, human rights experts, ethicists, and representatives from potentially affected communities. Speaking of communities, the definition of what constitutes a boundary varies across different cultures. Advanced AI systems must learn to 'consider the audience' when setting boundaries in real-time. Transparency builds more than trust; it also creates accountability. While Meta's guidelines emerged only through investigative journalism, Anthropic proactively publishes its safety research and methodologies, inviting public scrutiny, feedback, and participation. Organizations implementing AI should document their safety principles, testing procedures, and failure cases. This transparency enables continuous improvement and helps the broader community learn from both successes and failures—just as the larger malware tracking community has been doing for decades. Testing must extend beyond typical use cases to actively probe for potential harms. Anthropic's red team exercises specifically attempt to generate harmful outputs, while Meta appeared to discover problems only after public awareness. Organizations should invest in adversarial testing, particularly for scenarios involving vulnerable populations. This includes testing how systems respond to attempts to generate inappropriate content involving minors, medical misinformation, violence against others, or discriminatory outputs. Implementation requires more than good intentions. Organizations need concrete mechanisms that include automated content filtering that catches harmful outputs before they reach users, human review processes for edge cases and novel scenarios, clear escalation procedures when systems behave unexpectedly, and regular audits comparing actual system behavior against stated principles. These mechanisms must have teeth as well. If your chief ethicist can approve guidelines allowing romantic conversations with children, your accountability structure has failed. Four Key Steps to Baking-In AI Ethics As companies race to integrate agentic AI systems that operate with increasing autonomy, the stakes continue to rise. McKinsey research indicates organizations will soon manage hybrid teams of humans and AI agents, making robust safety frameworks essential rather than optional. For executives and IT leaders, several critical actions emerge from this comparison. First, establish AI principles before building AI products. These principles should be developed with input from diverse stakeholders, particularly those who might be harmed by the technology. Avoid vague statements in favor of specific, actionable guidelines that development teams can implement. Second, invest in safety infrastructure from the beginning. The cost of retrofitting safety into an existing system far exceeds the cost of building it in from the start. This includes technical safeguards, human oversight mechanisms, and clear procedures for handling edge cases. Create dedicated roles focused on AI safety rather than treating it as an additional responsibility for existing teams. Third, implement genuine accountability mechanisms. Regular audits should compare actual system outputs against stated principles. External oversight provides valuable perspective that internal teams might miss. Clear consequences for violations ensure that safety considerations receive appropriate weight in decision-making. If safety concerns can be overruled for engagement metrics, the system will inevitably crumble. Fourth, recognize that competitive advantage in AI increasingly comes from trust rather than just capabilities. Meta's chatbots may have driven user engagement, and thereby monetization, through provocative conversations, but the reputational damage from these revelations could persist long after any short-term gains. Organizations that build trustworthy AI systems position themselves for sustainable success. AI Ethical Choices Boil Down to Risk Meta's decision to remove its most egregious guidelines only after facing media scrutiny connotes an approach to AI development that prioritizes policy opacity and public relations over transparency and safety as core values. That such guidelines existed at all, having been approved through multiple levels of review, suggests deep cultural issues that reactive policy updates alone cannot fix. Bipartisan outrage continues to build in Congress. Senators Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn have called for immediate investigations, while the Kids Online Safety Act gains renewed momentum. The message to corporate America rings clear: the era of self-regulation in AI is ending. Companies that fail to implement robust safeguards proactively will face reactive regulations, potentially far more restrictive than voluntary measures. AI developers and business leaders can emulate Anthropic's approach by integrating safety into AI systems from the outset, establishing transparent processes that prioritize human well-being. Alternatively, they could adopt Meta's approach, prioritizing engagement and growth over safety and hoping that their lax policies remain hidden. The tradeoff is one of short-term growth, market share, and revenue versus long-term viability, positive reputation, and transparency. Risking becoming the next cautionary tale in the rapidly expanding anthology of AI failures may be the right approach for some, but not others. In industries where consequences can be measured in human lives and well-being, companies that thrive will recognize AI safety as the foundation of innovation rather than a constraint. Indeed, neither approach is entirely salvific. As 19th-century essayist and critic H. L. Mencken penned, 'Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority.'
