AI Summary
5 min readA Judge Hits Meta With Nearly a Billion Dollars, ByteDance Trains a 10-Trillion-Parameter Model, and AMD Buys a Chip Startup That Etches Weights Into Silicon
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $942 million — a combination of civil penalties and a new "abatement fund" — after finding that its platforms created a public nuisance by harming teens. The ruling is the first courtroom test of whether social media companies can be held responsible for content on their platforms, and the next trial, seeking more than $1 trillion in damages, starts jury selection next week. Meanwhile, ByteDance is pre-training a model with as many as 10 trillion parameters, AMD acquired a Toronto startup that bakes model weights directly into silicon for blistering inference speeds, and OpenAI's first hardware device — a donut-shaped smart speaker co-designed with Jony Ive — is expected to cost between $300 and $400.
Meta's New Mexico Loss and the Trillion-Dollar Trial Ahead
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:04) **Episode Intro & Headlines** - Brian McCullough welcomes listeners to Friday's show and lists the day's major stories.
- 2 (00:32) **Meta Ordered to Pay $942M in New Mexico** - A judge rules Meta must pay $567 million into an abatement fund and $375 million in civil penalties, plus enact safety features for teens.
- 3 (02:45) **ByteDance Pre-Training a 10 Trillion Parameter Model** - The Chinese tech giant is training an AI model three times larger than the biggest Chinese model released to date, according to the FT.
- 4 (05:13) **AMD Acquires Talus to Etch Weights into Silicon** - AMD's acquisition of Talus promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude by baking model weights directly into the chip.
- 5 (08:50) **OpenAI's First Hardware Device Leaked** - Mark Gurman reports OpenAI's upcoming device is a donut-shaped, battery-powered smart speaker without a display, likely costing $300-$400.
- 6 (11:10) **Long Read: AI Designed New Viruses** - Scientists trained AI (Evo) on genetic sequences to design 16 new viruses not found in nature, which successfully infected bacteria.
- 7 (14:11) **Long Read: Taking Better Smartphone Photos** - David Emel at The Verge explains that modern phone sensors are excellent, but default camera apps don't utilize them well.
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Show Notes
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $942M over harms to kids, with a trillion-dollar trial next. ByteDance started pretraining a 10T-parameter model, AMD bought Taalas to etch weights into silicon, and OpenAI's 2027 gadget leaked.
Links
- Meta Ordered to Pay $942 Million to Address Harm to Kids From Social Media (The Wall Street Journal)
- Sources: ByteDance is pretraining an AI model with up to 10T parameters, roughly 3x larger than Kimi K3 and larger than the 8T estimate for Anthropic's Mythos 5 (Financial Times)
- AMD acquires Toronto-based Taalas, which integrates model weights directly into silicon with the promise to boost inference performance, for an undisclosed sum (The Register)
- Sources: OpenAI's new device, slated for 2027, is a hockey puck-sized smart speaker with moving parts that help give it personality and will likely cost $300+ (Bloomberg)
Longreads
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