Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, in July 2021.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta can thank Chinese retailers for helping lift the company’s first-quarter sales after three consecutive quarters of revenue declines.
As chief financial officer Susan Li told analysts during company’s first-quarter earnings call, the social networking giant “saw acceleration among advertisers in China targeting users and other markets, which we believe was due in part to dropping shipping costs and easing Covid lockdown for those advertisers.”
In other words, Chinese companies spent a lot of money over a three-month period ending in late March on Facebook ads intended for consumers living outside the country. It’s a sign that China’s recent easing of its zero-Covid policy has indirectly benefited Meta, with Chinese companies using Facebook and Instagram’s massive reach around the world to land new customers.
Still, Meta’s sales grew only 3% year-over-year to $27.91 billion during the first quarter, underscoring that there’s still turbulence in the digital advertising market.
Li said that Meta also saw stronger demand in the quarter as the Russia-Ukraine War passed its one-year mark as of February, but she wasn’t prepared to say that the rest of year will be smooth sailing for the company.
Meta expects “a volatile macro environment” for the rest of the year and a “challenging regulatory environment” overall, Li said, referring to European Union regulators who continue imposing tough data privacy laws and requirements that impact the company.
But the mere fact that Meta was able to turn the tide on its declining sales after a harsh period was enough to cause investors to rejoice, sending the company’s shares rising nearly 12% in after-hours trading.
Investors were also keen to hear Zuckerberg preach Meta’s “year of efficiency” that will result in some 21,000 employees exiting the company by early summer.
Zuckerberg addressed the company’s recent round of layoffs that impacted technical workers last week and reminded analysts that more job cuts will hit business groups in May.
After May, Li said that the company “will resume hiring and we would expect headcount growth in excess of 1 to 2% in 2024.”
Zuckerberg gave no signs of planning to slow down spending on the metaverse, the highly speculative bet on virtual worlds that engendered the company’s name change from Facebook announced in 2021.
Indeed the company’s Reality Labs unit, which is building the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies needed for the yet-to-be developed metaverse, logged nearly $4 billion in first-quarter losses off $339 million in sales.
The metaverse still remains a core priority for Meta, Zuckerberg said, even though it’s also working on new artificial intelligence technologies that could aid its advertising and business messaging services.
“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse division, so I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now and we will continue to focus on both.”
OpenAI’s short-form artificial intelligence video app Sora hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch in late September, according to an executive.
Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, shared the milestone in a post on X late Wednesday. He said Sora reached 1 million downloads even faster than ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot that supports 800 million weekly active users.
Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means people need a code to access it. Despite these restrictions, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.
“Team [is] working hard to keep up with surging growth,” Peebles wrote.
Sora’s launch has also sparked intense backlash, namely around whether the app infringes on copyrights. CNBC viewed videos on the platform that included characters from shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Rick and Morty” and “South Park,” and was able to generate many characters independently.
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The Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television, motion picture and home video industries, said in a statement Monday that “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service.”
“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue,” Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA said in the statement. “Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week.
During a briefing with reporters at the company’s DevDay event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that Sora is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices.
“Please give us some grace,” Altman said. “The rate of change will be high.”
An Intel manufacturing technician holds an Intel Core Ultra series 3 processor (code-named Panther Lake) built on Intel 18A, inside Intel’s new Fab 52 in Chandler, Arizona, in September 2025.
Courtesy: Intel
Intel on Thursday announced its new PC chips slated to debut in laptops next year as the chipmaker battles to turn around its struggling business.
The company said the new Panther Lake processor is made with its 18A technology and is the most advanced node made on U.S. soil.
The new generation of chips will be made at Intel’s Fab 52 facility in Arizona, which the company said is now fully operational and set to ramp production.
“The United States has always been home to Intel’s most advanced R&D, product design and manufacturing – and we are proud to build on this legacy as we expand our domestic operations and bring new innovations to the market,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a release announcing the news.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan holds a wafer of CPU tiles for the Intel Core Ultra series 3, code-named Panther Lake, outside the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. Panther Lake is the first client system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the Intel 18A process node.
Courtesy: Intel
Intel’s latest reveal comes during a critical stretch for the beleaguered chipmaker that has lagged in recent years and struggled to keep up with cutting-edge chip demands spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.
Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 8, 2025.
Candice Ward | Google Cloud | Getty Images
Google is taking another shot at selling businesses on artificial intelligence agents by introducing subscriptions featuring agents that perform specific work tasks.
Gemini Enterprise targets large organizations, starting at a monthly fee of $30 per person. Gemini Business, for smaller clients, costs $21 per person each month. The offerings enable corporate workers to build agents that draw on data from Box, Microsoft and Salesforce products.
Premade Google agents for software development, data science and customer engagement also come with the new Gemini subscriptions, along with access to agents from Workday and other companies. They include the capabilities of Agentspace, an agent building product Google announced in December. Google will upgrade current Agentspace clients to Gemini Enterprise or Gemini Business free of charge through the course of their contracts, a spokesperson said.
Gemini subscriptions come with Model Armor, a feature for inspecting and blocking requests and responses in AI chats, so organizations don’t need to fuss with setting it up.
The launch comes three days after OpenAI showed how people can access tools from third-party apps in ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, are looking to get enterprises hooked on agents that take care of some processes, so employees can do other things. Both companies sell services aimed at developers and at nontechnical workers. Neither Gemini Enterprise nor Gemini Business require coding.
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“We’ve seen people from consulting services companies, telecommunications companies, software companies, hospitality companies and a variety of different manufacturing companies all using these, and in a variety of scenarios,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, in a media briefing.
Kurian, who accelerated the unit’s year-over-year revenue growth back above 30% in the second quarter, named cruise line Virgin Voyages as a Gemini Enterprise early adopter.
Firms are more likely to be exploring or testing AI agents than putting them into production, said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. But Google’s handling of security and governance should ease concerns among big companies evaluating agent systems, Dekate said.
Google’s new Gemini subscriptions depend on the company’s Gemini AI models for working with text, images and videos. Google and other model makers regularly release new versions, and enterprises want to avoid getting stuck with lagging models when selecting agent software, Dekate said.
“How Google is able to leverage this unified messaging in the Gemini 3.0 launch sequence, which is coming soon, I think, will also be a crucial litmus test,” he said. “In other words, will they be able to offer a same-day sort of innovation cycle, or is this going to be staggered in terms of adoption patterns?”