Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images
Meta has new artificial intelligence tools and celebrity-endorsed digital assistants that CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes will help eventually help jumpstart the metaverse.
Zuckerberg showed off the AI software as well as the company’s new Quest 3 virtual reality headset and latest Ray-Ban smart glasses on Wednesday at Meta’s Connect conference for VR developers at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Users of Facebook’s various chatting apps like WhatsApp and Messenger will soon be able to share digital stickers that can be automatically created via written prompts, capitalizing on the popularity of technology like ChatGPT.
For example, users can write the prompt “pizza playing basketball” to generate a goofy looking digital sticker of a cartoonish pizza slice holding a basketball.
Zuckerberg also introduced new AI-powered editing tools coming next month to Instagram that will let users alter their photos and pictures with written prompts. He showed in a demonstration how various prompts could modify one of his childhood photos to picture the young executive wearing an ugly sweater in one image and sporting blue hair in another. He also converted a photo of his dog Beast to resemble something akin to an origami figurine.
Powering the new AI tools is the company’s Emu computer vision model, which Zuckerberg characterized as a kind of sibling technology to its Llama family of language-generating software. The Emu software can generate images in around five seconds, he said.
“My kids tell me it’s still not fast enough, but five seconds gets to a point where you’re really cooking,” Zuckerberg said.
Users will eventually be able to automatically generate realistic visuals within Meta’s chat tools similar to how people use the Midjourney AI app within the Discord messaging service.
The company’s new Meta AI digital assistant is like ChatGPT, which generates sophisticated answers to text queries. The digital assistant can access Microsoft’s Bing search engine to help it compile responses to prompts that require real-time information, Zuckerberg said.
Meta has partnered with various celebrities like Paris Hilton, Mr. Beast and Kendall Jenner to represent digital characters. Users can ask a digital assistant named Lorena, who is played by the celebrity Padma Lakshmi, questions related to travel, and Lorena will presumably offer travel-specific tips. Or they can play a game of Dungeons & Dragons with a narrator called a dungeon master played by the rapper Snoop Dog.
Zuckerberg said users will eventually be able to create their own digital assistants, but the company wants to test that ability with select businesses before rolling it out more widely.
The grand plan is for people to interact with these AI-powered digital assistants in the company’s yet-to-be built metaverse, the digital universe that’s costing Meta billions of dollars a quarter as it tries to create the next-generation computing platform.
While Zuckerberg is still all-in on the metaverse, he’s talking a lot more about AI than at past Connect conferences. He said the company’s AI investments are linked with building the foundation for the metaverse, as illustrated by its latest Ray-Ban smart glasses developed with EssilorLuxottica. The new glasses, which will cost $299 when they’re available to purchase on Oct. 17, come embedded with Meta’s AI software so people can identify landmarks or translate signs when looking at various objects.
“Before this last year of AI breakthroughs, I kind of thought that smart glasses were only really going to become ubiquitous once we really dialed in, you know, the holograms and the displays and all of that stuff, which we’re making progress on,” Zuckerberg said.
Now, Zuckerberg said, “I think that the AI part of this is going to be just as important,” because AI makes smart glasses more compelling.
A sign is posted in front of a Broadcom office in San Jose, California, on Dec. 12, 2024.
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Broadcom reported second-quarter earnings on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations, and the chipmaker provided robust guidance for the current period.
Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
Earnings per share: $1.58 adjusted versus $1.56 expected
Revenue: $15 billion versus $14.99 billion expected
Broadcom said it expects about $15.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, versus $15.70 billion expected by Wall Street analysts. Revenue in the latest quarter rose 20% on an annual basis.
The company said net income increased to $4.97 billion, or $1.03 per share, from $2.12 billion, or 44 cents per share, in the year-ago period. The company instituted a 10-for-1 stock split a year ago.
Broadcom shares are up 12% this year after more than doubling last year on investor optimism for the company’s custom chips for artificial intelligence. In March, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said it was developing AI chips with three large cloud customers.
Broadcom said that it had $4.4 billion in AI revenue during the quarter, attributing the sales to its networking parts that connect complicated server clusters.
Tan said in a statement that Broadcom expects $5.1 billion in AI chip sales in the third quarter, adding that the company’s “hyperscale partners continue to invest.”
Hyperscalers are companies that build out large cloud systems to rent out to their own customers. They include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Those sales are reported in the company’s semiconductor solutions business, which had $8.4 billion in revenue during the quarter, a 17% increase from last year, and above $8.34 billion analyst estimate, according to StreetAccount.
The company’s software business, which includes VMware, grew 25% year-over-year to $6.6 billion in sales, beating the StreetAccount estimate.
Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build 2025, conference in Seattle, Washington, on May 19, 2025.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
On a down day for the market, Microsoft reached a record high for the first time in 11 months.
Shares of the software giant rose 0.8% to close at $467.68. Microsoft has once again reclaimed the title of world’s largest company by market cap, with a valuation of $3.48 trillion. Nvidia has a market cap of $3.42 trillion, and Apple is valued at $3 trillion.
Microsoft last recorded a record close in July 2024. The stock is now up 11% for the year, while the Nasdaq is flat.
Tech stocks broadly dropped on Thursday, led by a plunge in Tesla, as CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump escalated their public beef. Musk, who was leading the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) until last week, has slammed the Trump-backed spending bill making its way through Congress, a spat that has turned personal.
But Microsoft investors appear to be tuning out that noise.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella focused on his company’s tight relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI in an interview with Bloomberg, some portions of which were published on Thursday.
“Why would any one of us want to go upset that?” he told Bloomberg. Nadella told analysts in January that OpenAI had made a large new commitment with Microsoft’s Azure cloud. In total, Microsoft has invested nearly $14 billion in OpenAI.
The Anduril Industries headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, US, on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Defense tech startup Anduril Industries has raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation, including the new capital, Chairman Trae Stephens said on Thursday.
“As we continue working on building a company that has the capacity to scale into the largest problems for the national security community, we thought it was really important to shore up the balance sheet and make sure we have the ability to deploy capital into these manufacturing and production problem sets that we’re working on,” Stephens told Bloomberg TV at the publication’s tech summit in San Francisco.
Reports of the latest financing surfaced in February, around the same time the company took over Microsoft‘s multibillion-dollar augmented reality headset program with the U.S. Army. Last week, Anduril announced a deal with Meta to create virtual and augmented reality devices intended for use by the Army.
The latest funding round, which doubles Anduril’s valuation from August, was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The venture firm contributed $1 billion, said Stephens, who’s also a partner at the firm.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries, speaks during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 16, 2023.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
Stephens said it’s the largest check Founders Fund has ever written.
Since its founding in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, Anduril has been working to shake up the defense contractor space currently dominated by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
Anduril has been a member of the CNBC Disruptor 50 list three times and ranked as No. 2 last year.
Luckey founded Anduril after his ousting from Facebook, which acquired Oculus in 2014 and later made the virtual reality headsets the centerpiece of its metaverse efforts.
Stephens emphasized the importance of the recent partnership between the two sides, and “Palmer being able to go back to his roots and reach a point of forgiveness with the Meta team.”
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In April, Founders Fund closed a $4.6 billion late-stage venture fund, according to a filing with the SEC. A substantial amount of the capital was provided by the firm’s general partners, including Stephens, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time.
Anduril is one of the most highly valued private tech companies in the U.S. and has been able to reel in large sums of venture money during a period of few big exits and IPOs. While the IPO market is showing signs of life after a three-plus year drought, Anduril isn’t planning to head in that direction just yet, Stephens said.
“Long term we continue to believe that Anduril is the shape of a publicly traded company,” Stephens said. “We’re not in any rapid path to doing that. We’re certainly going through the processes required to prepare for doing something like that in the medium term. Right now we’re just focused on the mission at hand, going at this as hard as we can.”