Meta wants to make its AI hardware slicker and more fashion-forward. It also needs to make its software more usable. The way to do all that appears to be hiring design maestros away from Apple. Meta has made a big move to hire two prominent designers away from rival tech giant Apple, likely putting them to work on designing Meta's next generation of AI hardware and the software that runs on it. Alan Dye, formerly Apple's vice president of Human Interface Design, will join Meta to head up a new design studio within Meta's Reality Labs.

Hands are the primary means through which humans interact with the world.

Whether it's poaching top talent away from competitors, acquiring AI startups or proclaiming that it will build data centers the size of Manhattan, Meta has been on a spending spree to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities for months now. The massive splurge is paying off, according to Meta's chief executive. In a new memo posted on Wednesday ahead of the company's quarterly earnings report, Mark Zuckerberg, describes his ambitions for developing what he calls "superintelligence". "Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves," Zuckerberg wrote. "The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight."

Hands are the primary means through which humans interact with the world. Reliable and always-available hand pose inference could yield new and intuitive control schemes for human-computer interactions, particularly in virtual and augmented reality. Computer vision is effective but requires one or multiple cameras and can struggle with occlusions, limited field of view, and poor lighting. Wearable wrist-based surface electromyography (sEMG) presents a promising alternative as an always-available modality sensing muscle activities that drive hand motion. However, sEMG signals are strongly dependent on user anatomy and sensor placement, and existing sEMG models have required hundreds of users and device placements to effectively generalize. To facilitate progress on sEMG pose inference, we introduce the emg2pose benchmark, the largest publicly available dataset of high-quality hand pose labels and wrist sEMG recordings. emg2pose contains 2kHz, 16 channel sEMG and pose labels from a 26-camera motion capture rig for 193 users, 370 hours, and 29 stages with diverse gestures - a scale comparable to vision-based hand pose datasets. We provide competitive baselines and challenging tasks evaluating real-world generalization scenarios: held-out users, sensor placements, and stages. emg2pose provides the machine learning community a platform for exploring complex generalization problems, holding potential to significantly enhance the development of sEMG-based human-computer interactions.

Meta shares soared 12% in after-hours trading following a strong fourth-quarter earnings report released the day after CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a beating in a contentious congressional hearing. The company also announced it will pay a 50 cent-per-share dividend to investors for the first time, and has authorized a 50bn share buyback program. Overall, Meta reported fourth-quarter revenue of 40.1bn, beating the predicted 39.18bn and up 25% year-over-year. The report comes as Meta, like many of its big tech peers, is seeking to integrate artificial intelligence tools into its core products. In a statement accompanying the report, Zuckerberg said Meta has "made a lot of progress on our vision for advancing AI and the metaverse".

Meta's increasingly aggressive push to promote Threads seems to be paying off. Mark Zuckerberg said the app currently has "just under" 100 million monthly active users, and that he thinks there's a "good chance" the app could reach 1 billion users in the next couple of years. "I thought for a long time, there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive and I think that if we keep at this for a few more years, then I think we have a good chance of achieving our vision there," Zuckerberg said during the company's third-quarter earnings call. Threads' growth has been closely watched since its July launch. The app saw 100 million sign-ups in its first week, but quickly saw engagement drop off amid complaints about limited functionality and feeds flooded with posts from brands.

The news leaked out, creating a wave that will soon become a tsunami with new layoffs and a change in the existing setting, but also an upheaval of future plans since Zuckerberg abandoned Metaverse. There was no major announcement or press release. There were just a few subtle signs that the metaverse was no longer Meta's top goal, hidden in blog postings and earnings calls. A shift in artificial intelligence has already succeeded the king of our future: Metaverse. After the big announcement, at the company's annual Connect conference in October 2021, Zuckerberg explained how his firm planned to create a new version of the internet as well as the company's renaming from Facebook to Meta.

A computer system can mimic human cognitive functions such as learning and problem-solving. Through AI, a computer system uses math and logic to simulate the reasoning that people use to learn from new information and make decisions. Furthermore, to train a computer to mimic human reasoning is to use a neural network, which is a series of algorithms that are modeled after the human brain. The neural network helps the computer system achieve AI through deep learning. This close connection is why the idea of Artificial Intelligence labs and ML is really about the ways.

Meta wants to make it clear it's not giving up on high-end VR experiences yet. So, in a rare move, the company is spilling the beans on several VR headset prototypes at once. The goal, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is to eventually craft something that could pass the "visual Turing Test," or the point where virtual reality is practically indistinguishable from the real world. That's the Holy Grail for VR enthusiasts, but for Meta's critics, it's another troubling sign that the company wants to own reality (even if Zuckerberg says he doesn't want to completely own the metaverse). As explained by Zuckerberg and Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist of Meta's Reality Labs, creating the perfect VR headset involves perfecting four basic concepts.