Nathaniel Whittemore

This also could just mark a shift in revenue strategy for Meta's beleaguered Reality Labs division.

The division behind their Metaverse efforts continues to bleed money, even with the success of the Meta Ray-Bans.

Last quarter, the division produced $4 billion in operating losses on revenue of $402 million, but Meta hopes the combination of useful consumer agents and new devices will drive new AI subscription revenue.

In the memo, VP of Wearables Alex Himmel wrote, "...to build a sustainable business beyond hardware margins, we need to monetize the software experiences that differentiate our devices."

It has actually been some time since we talked about AI wearables.

And one of the things that I'm watching most closely for on that front is whether all those efforts fall for open AI, specifically in the category of side quests that they are now trying to avoid, or whether that's still an area that they really plan on competing.

Now, one more story on the Meta front.

The company also just suffered a massive exploit, which many are blaming on AI.

On Monday, numerous Instagram accounts were hijacked, including the Obama White House and Sephora.

Users who had their account stolen said that they were unable to reach a human tech support worker.

Back in March, Meta announced that they would be rolling out AI support to all accounts across Facebook and Instagram to carry out routine tasks like password requests.

However, the system appears to have some pretty significant flaws, and over recent days, videos have been circulating on Telegram, exploiting the exploit.

An attacker can simply ask Meta's AI to link any arbitrary account to a new email address when requesting a password reset.

For verified accounts, the AI bot will ask for a video of the person to prove liveness, but hackers found that an AI-generated video of the account owner would pass the checks.

Hackers also needed to use a VPN to spoof the correct location, which became trivial when Meta added location data to Instagram profiles.

Two-factor authentication was completely bypassed and many didn't notice anything was amiss until their account was gone.

Commentators are fairly baffled by the misstep.

In a series of tweets, GriglioRose writes, It's wild how Meta, a company going all-in on AI, somehow missed the memo on how AI can generate images and videos that renders take-a-selfie verifications utterly useless.

Seemingly confirming everyone's fears about over-reliance on AI and under-reliance on real humans, he later added, I'm hearing Instagram's trust and safety was absolutely gutted over the last few weeks, with 60% of the org gone between layoffs and forced reassignments to data labeling.

All while AI maxing pushed a bunch of bugs to production.