Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg reveals the Muse'charm' device during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, this week. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg reveals the Muse'charm' device during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, this week. We earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. The tech giant has launched a cute'little guy' that can answer emails, book travel or do your weekly food shop After the recent backlash against Meta's so-called "pervert" smart glasses, this week Mark Zuckerberg launched a much cuter alternative: the Muse "charm" device. With a screen that shows a cutesy little avatar, it has drawn comparisons with Tamagotchis.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reveals the Muse Charm device during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Wednesday. MENLO PARK, California - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday unveiled a small handheld gadget called Meta Charm for using its new Muse AI assistant, taking the company's hardware efforts beyond its successful smart glasses. The AI device, about the size of an Apple AirPods case, features a roughly 2-inch (5 centimeter) touchscreen and a built-in 5G connection. Meta said Charm would be ready to ship for the holidays in December but did not give a price. "We pack the whole Muse experience, including the whole real-time voice and avatar stack, into something that fits on a keychain and is always available to talk to," Zuckerberg said at Meta's annual device event, Meta Connect, in Menlo Park, California. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

The company is bringing its Private Processing encryption service to its much-maligned smart glasses. Meta knows you probably have some privacy concerns about its smart glasses . At its annual Meta Connect event today in Menlo Park, California, the company announced plans to incorporate its siloed AI processing scheme known as Private Processing into its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The feature, designed for WhatsApp last year, allows the glasses' AI assistant to get to know you and fulfill your requests without Meta accessing any of your data. "Most of the time, glasses are helping you see well, protecting your eyes and complementing your look, and that's it," Meta wrote in its press release, perhaps somewhat underselling the monumental historic significance of vision-correcting lenses as a technology.

Meta Connect used to be all about VR, but in recent years, the event has come to be the launchpad for all of the company's hardware, Metaverse and AI projects. This year, we're expecting CEO Mark Zuckerberg to unveil a slew of new products across its smart glasses, headsets and AI portfolios. In fact, its own website for Connect says that the next two days will showcase "our latest breakthroughs in AI technologies, AI glasses and VR -- designed to help you connect, create and do more of what you care about most." Zuckerberg is slated to present the keynote speech at 7PM ET (4PM PT) later today, with additional developer talks and sessions scheduled for tomorrow. Our senior reporter Karissa Bell will be on the ground in Menlo Park, CA, reporting live from the company's headquarters.

From smart glasses to AI pins, privacy fears challenge tech's next big bet Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses appear on screen, during the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 27, 2023. SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK - Companies betting artificial intelligence devices will usher in a post-smartphone era are fueling privacy fears around the globe that could slow adoption of the emerging technology. The backlash against devices that can see, hear and respond to the world around them has been strongest against Meta's Ray-Bans, which made smart glasses mainstream by pairing EssilorLuxottica's trendy designs with AI from the social media giant chasing "personal superintelligence." The glasses have become a lightning rod for growing unease over AI-powered devices, drawing scrutiny from courts weighing privacy lawsuits, users fearing covert recordings and critics warning of a future in which ubiquitous AI eyewear erodes expectations of anonymity and consent. Several U.K. venues, including one of the country's biggest pub chains, Wetherspoon, have restricted the use of the frames.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a giant image of Ray-Ban smart glasses appears on screen, in Menlo Park, California, on 27 September 2023. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a giant image of Ray-Ban smart glasses appears on screen, in Menlo Park, California, on 27 September 2023. Exclusive: Documents show officers from Maine to California worry Meta's camera-equipped glasses will be used either to secretly record them or aid acts of terrorism In January, the New York Police Department's counterterrorism unit sent out a memo warning police officers about a new potential "security and counterintelligence" threat: Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The memo directed officers to "conduct thorough inspections of all eyewear permitted within inmate cells" and cautioned that people who have been arrested could use these glasses, equipped with small cameras and microphones, to record inside police facilities. The memo cited two examples of such videos posted on social media.

Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the company's Connect developer conference on 17 September 2025 in Menlo Park, California. Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the company's Connect developer conference on 17 September 2025 in Menlo Park, California. Zuckerberg pushes'superintelligent' AI for all as Meta drops open-source model Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy essay on Monday detailing his views on artificial intelligence and announced several plans for how Meta would develop the technology in the future. The CEO's essay went online the same day as Meta released a new, open-source AI model that seeks to rival Anthropic and OpenAI's products called Muse Glimmer. Over the course of more than 6,000 words in a post titled "The Future is for Everyone," Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics related to AI that included datacenters, government regulation, cybersecurity, the creation of bioweapons, labor market disruption, surveillance powers and more.

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Causal generative models provide a principled framework for answering observational, interventional, and counterfactual queries from observational data. However, many deep causal models rely on highly expressive architectures with opaque mechanisms, limiting auditability in high-stakes domains. We propose KaCGM, a causal generative model for mixed-type tabular data where each structural equation is parameterized by a Kolmogorov--Arnold Network (KAN). This decomposition enables direct inspection of learned causal mechanisms, including symbolic approximations and visualization of parent--child relationships, while preserving query-agnostic generative semantics. We introduce a validation pipeline based on distributional matching and independence diagnostics of inferred exogenous variables, allowing assessment using observational data alone. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic benchmarks show competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. A real-world cardiovascular case study further demonstrates the extraction of simplified structural equations and interpretable causal effects. These results suggest that expressive causal generative modeling and functional transparency can be achieved jointly, supporting trustworthy deployment in tabular decision-making settings. Code: https://github.com/aalmodovares/kacgm

Smart glasses privacy concerns prompt Android app Nearby Glasses by Yves Jeanrenaud that detects hidden cameras by scanning Bluetooth signals from Meta and Snap devices.