Meta hired new consultant for the intern
Also, HP bought a fax machine and broke it

The $14 Billion Temp Agency

Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is apparently frustrated with the quality of its current Artificial Intelligence output, which is a very polite way of saying the Llama model keeps filing the wrong TPS reports. To solve this minor inconvenience, the company is committing $14.3 billion to a "strategic investment" in Scale AI, the data labeling firm. This massive expenditure essentially buys Meta a 49 percent stake in the consulting agency that provides the high quality training data which makes these models appear intelligent in the first place.

In a move that is absolutely not at all about buying talent, Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, a 28 year old MIT dropout, is also joining the Meta team to head a new superintelligence lab. Mr. Wang will report directly to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg; presumably the goal is to develop an Artificial General Intelligence that can, at a minimum, generate a coherent social media strategy. The immediate, and frankly expected, side effect of this major investment is that rivals like Google and OpenAI are seeing their access to Scale AI’s services quietly restricted, ensuring that the entire AI arms race now boils down to who can afford the best quality outsourced manual labor.

Corporate Hand-Washing Protocol: The Palm Failure

A post by former Chief Technology Officer Phil McKinney outlines the now legendary corporate misstep that saw Hewlett Packard, or HP, purchase Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010; only to immediately kill the webOS mobile platform in a stunning display of boardroom indecision. Mr. McKinney, who championed the acquisition, details how he watched the whole thing fall apart from his bed while recovering from a medical emergency, a detail that perfectly captures the helplessness of watching a project you staked your career on get demolished by a corporate shakeup.

The original plan was to give the Palm team a hands off three year window to revitalize the product; instead, the arrival of new Chief Executive Léo Apotheker led to the TouchPad tablet being launched, failing spectacularly, and then being killed after a mere 49 days on the market. It is an enduring lesson that good intentions, a breakthrough operating system, and a billion dollars are no match for a change in C suite strategy and a completely different idea of what the company should be selling.

Apple Reinvents The Window, Again

Apple is rolling out a new graphical user interface element dubbed Liquid Glass, which is exactly what it sounds like, making interface elements look like curved and refractive glass. The news is that this is not simply a decorative refresh but actually prep work for their rumored Augmented Reality devices, meaning Apple is changing the look of your phone today so that your future expensive glasses do not look completely foreign when they arrive.

This design language, which gives menus and buttons a wet, shimmering texture, is a major philosophical shift toward blending digital and physical interactions; or perhaps it is just a major commitment to making sure the iPhone UI is fully coordinated with the company’s mixed reality efforts. Either way, your operating system is now slightly more reflective, and you will need new hardware to run the fancy new shaders at full speed.

Briefs

• Memory Allocator Quits: The development of the popular memory allocator jemalloc has officially ended after 20 years, leaving major projects like Redis to figure out their own memory housekeeping and clean up their own fragmentation messes.
• Solar System to Scale: A delightful project from 2014 resurfaces, showing an accurately scaled model of the solar system where the Moon is exactly one pixel wide. The resulting length of the model is a humbling reminder of the size of the office park we actually inhabit.
• Explosive Recall: Anker is recalling over 1.1 million power banks due to fire and burn risks. The portable charger is now a portable stove, which is technically a feature, but not one you want.