Wednesday’s top story: Meta is splitting its research and business unit—Reality Labs—into two parts: Metaverse and Wearables, which will result in a small number of layoffs.
📉 Meta splits: layoffs ahead
⚙️ How to scale your business with intelligent automation
🦋 Chat with butterflies?
🎙️ How AI is changing the employment industry
🤖 How to create Facebook ads with ChatGPT
🌟 Another AI search start-up threatens Google
🌍 Global Apple AI training
Read Time: 5 minutes
📈 P.S Nvidia continues higher breaking last week’s high- Fuelled by AI optimism. Find out more.
Our Report: Meta has decided to split its business and research unit—Reality Labs (previously known as Oculus VR)—into two parts: Metaverse and Wearables, which will result in layoffs.
🔑 Key Points:
Although Meta hasn’t established how many employees have been affected by the layoffs, reports say it's a small number, primarily affecting redundant leadership positions.
The centralized Metaverse team will focus on the Oculus and Quest headset lines, Horizon (an online VR game with an integrated game creation system), and associated technologies.
The newly formed Wearables team will work on the rest of Meta’s hardware initiatives, including its smart glasses collaboration with Ray-Ban (which was "a much bigger success than expected").
🤔 Why you should care: This latest round of layoffs comes after Zuckerberg is reportedly planning to lay off around 50 VPs, amid his ‘year of efficiency’, in which he’s already made over 20,000 employees redundant, as he works to create a “leaner” operating structure that includes a flatter hierarchy.
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Our Report: After successfully raising $4.8M in a seed round in November, former Snapchat engineer—Vu Tran—has launched a social media network, called Butterflies, where AI and humans interact together.
Key Points:
The app looks like Instagram, but once signed up, users create an AI character (a Butterfly)—with opinions and emotions—which creates posts that other AIs and humans can interact with.
After five months in private beta—where the average user spent 1-3 hrs a day interacting with AI—Butterflies received glowing reviews and is now available on Apple and Google Play Stores.
Tran believes that Butterflies is “one of the most wholesome ways to interact with AI” and feels it will help people (especially those with social anxiety) connect with others, both AI and humans.
Why you should care: The launch of a social media network where humans and AI interact with each other, seamlessly, gives us a sneaky peek into what we can expect the future of social media to look like, especially after Meta announced it’s building an AI Studio “so that anyone can build their own AIs”, and TikTok has just started letting content creators build their own avatars so they can expand their global reach: But is this a future we like the look of?
Type this prompt into ChatGPT:
“I'm looking for a Facebook ad copy that will use the influence and reach of [influencer type] to showcase the unique features and benefits of my [product/service] to my [ideal customer persona] and encourage them to make a purchase.”
Results: After typing this prompt, you will get Facebook ad copy that will highlight the features and benefits of your product/service to your ideal customer.
P.S. Use the Prompt Engineer GPT by AI Tool report to 10x your prompts.
Our Report: Genspark, an AI-powered search engine—that says it’s better than Perplexity, Arc Search, and Google AI Overviews—has managed to raise $60M in funding, valuing the company at $250M, despite having made no revenue!
🔑 Key Points:
In response to a search query, Genspark creates a filtered, one-page summary (called a “Sparkpage”) of highly authoritative content, and has a chatbot for follow-up questions.
Co-founder, Eric Jing, says it beats its rivals because it uses both in-house large language models (LLMs) and third-party models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
This means the content displayed is more detailed and holistic, and includes things like videos, tips, chatbot integration, pros and cons, and aggregated comments and reviews.
🤔 Why you should care: With no revenue coming in and major competitors to battle, you can’t help but wonder how Genspark managed to raise $60M, but it seems the background and experience of the two co-founders—Eric Jing (former Baidu exec) and Kay Zhu (former Google and Baidu engineer)—is instilling confidence, with investors calling their approach “genuinely compelling”, recognizing they have “a proven track record of developing successful products and businesses, particularly in the AI and search domains.”
Our Report: Apple has announced that it will be offering AI training and mentoring to all Apple Developer Academy students and Apple Developer Alumni.
🔑 Key Points:
Starting in September, students from the 18 Apple Developer Academies across Brazil, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the United States, will get the new curriculum.
Students will learn the basics of AI technologies and get guidance on how to build and train AI models, so they can build, train, and deploy them across Apple devices.
They’ll also complete project-based assignments throughout the course, and get support from key industry mentors and over 12,000 academy alumni from across the world.
🤔 Why you should care: This announcement follows the sweep of AI updates that Apple announced at its World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) last week, which will be powered by its own Apple Intelligence framework.
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Until next time, Martin & Liam.
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