Next week, Meta is cutting about 10 percent of its staff. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen current and former employees about what it's like inside a company where everyone is unhappy. As Meta employees brace for layoffs next Wednesday, May 20, many say the vibes are horrifically, historically low. "Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives," says an employee who works on Instagram. The social media giant plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce, or nearly 8,000 people, "to run the company more efficiently" and "offset the other investments" it's making, according to a human resources leader .

Instagram's Instants app lets you send disappearing photos--and it's probably where your horny friends will post spicy pics. Meta launched a new app on Wednesday, called Instants, that integrates with existing Instagram accounts and allows users to send unedited, disappearing photos. Instants leans into the popularity of Instagram's Stories feature and Close Friends lists, where users can selectively share images with a smaller audience. Instants is available as a stand-alone app on iOS and Android in select countries, and it's accessible through Instagram's direct messaging tab. The core of Instants, from its name to the bare-bones layout, is designed to evoke a sense of ephemerality.

Samsung's unionized workers may strike for 18 days starting May 21st over bonus pay disputes, potentially costing the company $700 million daily in lost memory production. PCWorld reports this strike could worsen the existing chip shortage and drive RAM prices even higher than current levels, which are already 3-4 times more expensive than last year. The disruption threatens global electronics supply chains despite Samsung's $13.4 billion profit in 2025. As if the AI data center boom wasn't causing enough problems for PC hardware, a looming strike in Samsung's home territory of South Korea could grind the memory giant's already-strained production to a halt. According to the latest reporting from Reuters, a long-simmering dispute between Samsung and its unionized labor force has boiled over, with no compromise in sight even after days of government-mediated talks.

Meta is introducing an option for WhatsApp users to have private chats with its AI assistant that not even the company can read. It's pitching Incognito Chat with Meta AI as a way to have clandestine conversations with the chatbot under the protection of end-to-end encryption, which WhatsApp has long offered for chats between humans. Meta revealed it was working on such a feature at its LlamaCon generative AI conference in April 2025. The company built Incognito Chat with Meta AI using its Private Processing tech . It said that messages exchanged with the chatbot in this mode are handled in a secure environment that no one else has access to. The messages are not saved and they disappear by default.

WhatsApp launches totally private'incognito' conversations with its AI chatbot WhatsApp has introduced private chats with its AI chatbot which not even the tech company will be able to read in a new incognito mode. It means neither the user nor the AI's responses will be monitored if the feature is activated, and past conversations will disappear from the chat for the user. Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said he felt people wanted to have private conversations with AI on sensitive subjects including health, relationships and finances and didn't want them to be accessible. But a cyber security expert has told the BBC this could lead to a lack of accountability for WhatsApp if things go wrong, as they would have no access to chat history. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which also owns Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

The company says its new Incognito Chat allows you to use its AI chatbot without anyone else--including Meta--being able to access your conversations. WhatsApp said on Wednesday it is launching an AI chat function known as Incognito Chat that is built to allow users to converse privately with Meta AI --such that Meta itself cannot access the questions or answers. The feature is based on WhatsApp's Private Processing scheme, which debuted a year ago and already underlies WhatsApp's existing AI features, including message summarization and composition tools. The idea of Incognito Chat is to create a way for WhatsApp to offer AI chat integration that does not conflict with the communication platform's commitment to end-to-end encryption, the privacy scheme in which only direct participants in a conversation can read messages or hear a call. Most generative AI platforms now offer some type of "incognito mode," but these features are usually designed to separate users from the questions they ask and the answers they receive rather than including a mechanism to entirely shield those questions and answers from the provider's view.

Imagine what happens if jobs actually start disappearing. Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders don't agree on much. But both think that AI is a disaster for the working class. The Vermont senator recently wrote that "AI oligarchs do not want to just replace specific jobs. They want to replace workers."

Google I/O, the company's big annual developer conference, is almost upon us . But the company isn't waiting until then to reveal what it has in store for Android. There was just far too much news on that front to squeeze into the I/O keynote, so Google revealed the details in the latest edition of The Android Show today. And, my goodness, were there a lot of details to reveal. From Gemini Intelligence and new laptops in the form of Googlebooks to an AirDrop-related update and Instagram editing tools in Android, Google had plenty of announcements to make. So, without further ado, here's an overview of everything Google announced during The Android Show: I/O edition.

Googlebook Is Google's New AI-Powered Laptop Platform Built on Android They won't replace Chromebooks, but Googlebooks have an Android-centered operating system, AI-first features like the Magic Pointer, and a promise of desktop-grade apps. Almost exactly 15 years since Google introduced Chromebooks and ChromeOS --which ushered a wave of cheap, functional, web-based laptops that would come to dominate the US education market--the company has announced a new laptop platform called Googlebook. It's built around artificial intelligence and Android, and while it isn't replacing Chromebooks, it could give the company a more meaningful foothold in the premium computer market. Google announced the platform on The Android Show on YouTube, where it also detailed new features coming in Android 17 and Gemini Intelligence (you can read more about that here). Google is purposefully not sharing the operating system's name yet (it was codenamed Aluminium OS internally); Googlebook is the platform, and Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all signed up to produce Googlebooks coming later this fall.

You'll soon be able to generate your own widgets or ask Gemini to finish a booking in Chrome on Android. The Google I/O annual developer conference is around the corner--May 19--but in what is quickly becoming a tradition, Google announced new features for Android and Gemini a week early. The news came on Tuesday via the second-ever Android Show on YouTube . This livestreamed presentation helps Google spread out the cavalcade of updates from the often jam-packed I/O keynote. The Android Show focused on new features in Android 17, the next version of Android coming later this summer, as well as several updates to the Gemini assistant experience. It continues the theme set last year by Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem, of turning Android into an "intelligent operating system."