Patrick Coffey

One element of your reporting that fascinated me was about how many processing facilities now use puffs of air rather than like robots with claws to separate materials.

Can you explain how that works?

So we think of this very low value, obviously, but what are some of the most valuable treasures that these AI-driven bots are picking out of our trash?

Welcome to Tech News Briefing.

It's Friday, January 9th.

I'm Patrick Coffey for The Wall Street Journal.

When Meta launched Reels on Instagram in 2020, it seemed like little more than a TikTok copycat, and it didn't generate any revenue.

Now it's set to bring in as much as Coca-Cola and Nike, and it's got plans to get even bigger.

We're diving into how Reels became a $50 billion business and where it's heading next.

Then, AI has a questionable reputation in the legal world, where there have been headlines about lawyers submitting briefs with errors and even cases that were entirely made up.

But it's not just lawyers.

Increasingly, it's being used by judges.

We look at how the tech is being used today and ask, are chatbot judges next?

But first, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a recent earnings call that Reels had surpassed a $50 billion run rate, meaning it's on track to make that amount of revenue in the next 12 months and become a bigger source of ad sales than YouTube.

Journal reporter Megan Bobrowski tells us how Meta created a solid business from a platform that many initially dismissed as a TikTok wannabe.

To start with the TLDR question, how did Reels become such a big business?

So fast forwarding to today, Reels is finally big.

The ad sales numbers, namely the fact that Reels is expected to bring in more than YouTube this year, really shocked me.

What do you take from that?

So the idea that a user's behavior rather than who they follow is what really drives their feed.