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Members of Gen Z take .5 selfies.

Courtesy of Duncan Grant, Rebecca Smith, Rachel Aquino and Gabriel Lesser.

When 16-year-old Riley Galfi met an artist she loves at a concert back in May, she didn’t ask to take any ordinary selfie with him, she asked to take a .5 selfie.

In a flash, Galfi flipped her phone around, angled it above her head and pressed the volume button to capture a fun, wide-angled picture. As she recounted the experience to CNBC, Galfi was beaming.

“I took a .5 with Aidan Bissett,” she said. “What? That’s really cool.”

The wide-angled image is colloquially called a .5 selfie, called a “point five” by Galfi and her peers. The cheeky photo trend has taken social media platforms by storm. 

The .5 selfie rose to prominence after Apple first introduced an Ultra Wide camera lens to its iPhone 11 product line. The style is particularly popular with members of Generation Z, or people born after 1997, according to the Pew Research Center

Gen Z has already witnessed the rise of smartphones, social media, and more recently, artificial intelligence, in their lifetimes, so these savvy users are accustomed to keeping up with ever-changing technology trends. 

On platforms like Instagram, for instance, Gen Z users don’t favor a perfectly curated feed full of posed and filtered photos. Instead, many are embracing a seemingly more effortless, messy, I-did-not-have-to-try-very-hard-to-capture-this-cool-outfit aesthetic. 

Enter the .5 selfie. 

“They’re not like the usual selfie, they shouldn’t be a well thought out picture that you take,” 24-year-old Rachel Aquino told CNBC in an interview. “It’s something that you just usually take on a whim, and something that really captures the moment in real time.” 

Aquino has taken a .5 photo every day for the past year. She said she uses them as an easy form of personal record keeping to capture her everyday life, her outfits, events and moments with family. 

She also likes to take .5 selfies when hanging out with friends, and she joked that if she doesn’t reach to take one, someone else will. Aquino said it usually takes her just two or three times to nail the shot since she isn’t striving for perfection. 

Rachel Aquino takes a .5 selfie.

Courtesy of Rachel Aquino

“Sometimes, I don’t look at the camera, sometimes, it’s literally the back of my head and me walking in the streets of New York, sometimes, it’s me sitting at a table with friends,” she said. “Sometimes, if I’m having a really good time and I don’t want to bother anyone, it’s like the back of everyone’s heads.”

At her job, Aquino is known as “the .5 queen,” and she said she often shares the photos to her Instagram and TikTok accounts. 

The .5 selfie is now a fixture of Instagram Stories and a popular Gen Z Instagram trend called a “photo dump,” where users share a group of up to 10 random, nonchronological photos to their main feed. Spliced between gorgeous landscapes and fancy meals, a .5 selfie can serve as a way for Gen Z to show off their personalities on the platform. 

Gabriel Lesser, a 21-year-old college student, said lots of his friends share their .5 photos on Instagram, and that they “always make the cut” in a photo dump. He said he has one friend who abides by the slogan “make Instagram casual again,” so she mainly posts .5 photos.     

“I think it just creates less of an expectation for the photo,” Lesser told CNBC in an interview. “You get some cool angles and funny, goofy proportions and you’re like, ‘This is hilarious.'”

Members of Gen Z take .5 selfies.

Courtesy of Emma Kelly, Rachel Aquino and Annika Kim Constantino

For many professional social media creators, the more casual online aesthetic has proved to be a lucrative one. Popular Gen Z creators like Alix Earle and Emma Chamberlain, who has more than 15.7 million Instagram followers, have built brands around their relatability. 

Chamberlain’s photos are edgy, fun and not totally polished, which means they could theoretically be recreated by anyone. Her more attainable vibe has helped her reach some less attainable early career milestones like inking a podcasting deal with Spotify, starting her own coffee company and traveling the world with brands like Louis Vuitton. 

Some creators have also gotten their start purely thanks to the .5 lens.

Internet users have become enamored with Sabrina Bahsoon, a creator on TikTok who is more affectionately known as “Tube Girl.” Bahsoon blew up on the video-sharing platform this year because of the .5 videos she films while taking public transit in London. Her videos ooze confidence and style, and they landed her a spot at a number of designer fashion shows this fall.

“Just to see someone out there recording and so confident and looking so good at the same time is crazy,” Aquino said. “I think that’s why Gen Z goes insane over the Tube Girl.”

How to take a .5 selfie

A member of Gen Z takes a .5 selfie.

Courtesy of Duncan Grant

To take a .5 selfie, start by opening the camera app on your iPhone. Flip the camera so you are looking at the scene in front of you, and not at your face like you would to take a traditional selfie. Tap the 0.5 button that appears over the word “photo” to access the camera’s Ultra Wide lens, and then turn your phone around so you can’t see the screen. 

The next step is all about the angle. Hold your arm out straight, raise your phone above your head and press the volume button to capture the shot. Be careful not to hit the power button by mistake. 

Since the angle of the camera is so wide, you usually don’t have to worry about squeezing multiple people into frame. As a result, .5 selfies can serve as a great way to capture large group settings or pretty backgrounds.

“Make sure you’re not shaking your arm when you’re taking them, because then you’ll get a distorted photo,” Lesser added. 

With some .5 photos, wacky distortion is actually the goal. Members of Gen Z were quick to discover that if you take a .5 photo really close to someone’s face — by pressing the phone to their forehead, for instance — you can make their eyes bulge, their nose stick out or their legs disappear. 

“If someone makes a funny face, it looks even funnier with .5,” Galfi said. “It’s kind of like making a caricature where you can make one feature stand out. I think that’s really fun.” 

Capture big and small moments

Gabriel Lesser takes a .5 selfie.

Courtesy of Gabriel Lesser

Lily McIntyre, 23, said she uses the .5 selfie to capture both the exciting and the normal events in her life. She has .5 photos depicting the scenery of her trip to Ireland, and others where she’s just hanging out in her living room.  

“I have all of these pictures that celebrate the mundane parts of my life for sure,” she told CNBC in an interview. “I feel like the beauty of the .5 is that you can apply it to anything.”

Similarly, Lesser takes at least one .5 photo a day to capture moments like a nice walk or breakfast with his grandparents. He said the .5 images serve as an easy way to document something without worrying too much about what he looks like. 

“People are tired of trying and performing for all the right angles,” Lesser said. “I think .5s are fun to take, especially as selfies, because you don’t see yourself while you’re taking it. So you don’t get to judge yourself, you don’t get to critique yourself.”

His grandparents also get a kick out of the photos, he added.

McIntyre said her generation often gets criticized for taking lots of photos and spending too much time on their phones, but she is grateful to have the “silly pictures” to look back on.

“I just think it’s a fun form of self-expression,” she said. “And it’s not limited to Gen Z. If you want to get on the .5 selfie train and you’re in a different generation, you can.”

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Mark Zuckerberg names ex-OpenAI employee chief scientist of new Meta AI lab

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Mark Zuckerberg names ex-OpenAI employee chief scientist of new Meta AI lab

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said Shengjia Zhao, the co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will serve as the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence hiring blitz in recent weeks, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI. In June, Zuckerberg announced a new organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs that’s made up of top AI researchers and engineers. 

Zhao’s name was listed among other new hires in the June memo, but Zuckerberg said Friday that Zhao co-founded the lab and “has been our lead scientist from day one.” Zhao will work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who is acting as Meta’s chief AI officer.

“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg wrote in a social media post. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.”

Read more CNBC tech news

In addition to co-creating ChatGPT, Zhao helped build OpenAI’s GPT-4, mini models, 4.1 and o3, and he previously led synthetic data at OpenAI, according to Zuckerberg’s June memo.

Meta Superintelligence Labs will be where employees work on foundation models such as the open-source Llama family of AI models, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects.

The social media company will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into AI compute infrastructure, Zuckerberg said earlier this month.

“The next few years are going to be very exciting!” Zuckerberg wrote Friday.

WATCH: Meta announces massive ‘Prometheus’ & ‘Hyperion’ data center plans

Meta announces massive 'Prometheus' & 'Hyperion' data center plans

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Palantir joins list of 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with stock more than doubling in 2025

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Palantir joins list of 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with stock more than doubling in 2025

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, speaks on a panel titled Power, Purpose, and the New American Century at the Hill and Valley Forum at the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

Palantir has hit another major milestone in its meteoric stock rise. It’s now one of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies.

The provider of software and data analytics technology to defense agencies saw its stock rise more than 2% on Friday to another record, lifting the company’s market cap to $375 billion, which puts it ahead of Home Depot and Procter & Gamble. The company’s market value was already higher than Bank of America and Coca-Cola.

Palantir has more than doubled in value this year as investors ramp up bets on the company’s artificial intelligence business and closer ties to the U.S. government. Since its founding in 2003 by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, the company has steadily accrued a growing list of customers.

Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business increased 45% to $373 million in its most recent quarter, while total sales rose 39% to $884 million. The company next reports results on Aug. 4.

Earlier this year, Palantir soared ahead of Salesforce, IBM and Cisco into the top 10 U.S. tech companies by market cap.

Buying the stock at these levels requires investors to pay hefty multiples. Palantir currently trades for 273 times forward earnings, according to FactSet. The only other company in the top 20 with a triple-digit ratio is Tesla at 175.

With $3.1 billion in total revenue over the past year, Palantir is a fraction the size of the next smallest company by sales among the top 20 by market cap. Mastercard, which is valued at $518 billion, is closest with sales over the past four quarters of roughly $29 billion.

WATCH: Palantir’s Mike Gallagher: Enforcing a ceasefire will require a greater investment of American power

Palantir's Mike Gallagher: Enforcing a ceasefire will require a greater investment of American power

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Inside Tesla’s new retro-futuristic Supercharger diner

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Inside Tesla's new retro-futuristic Supercharger diner

Tesla has opened the doors to its first diner Supercharger station in Los Angeles.

CEO Elon Musk first teased the concept of building a drive-in themed charging station in 2018. On Monday, that vision was finally realized. Tesla describes the two-story restaurant, constructed of a steel exterior inspired by the Cybertruck, as retro-futuristic. It features 80 charging stalls and two 66-foot megascreens playing a rotation of short films, feature-length movies and Tesla videos.

The diner operates 24/7 serving classic American comfort food, such as burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches and milkshakes, to both electric vehicle owners charging their cars and the general public. CNBC visited the site and spoke with early patrons, who praised both the design and the food.

“It’s pretty cool. It has a very vintage vibe, but futuristic vibe at the same time” said Taju, who stopped by with a friend who drives a Tesla.

“I would bring friends from out of town, they would be very impressed coming to a place like this” said Don, a Model 3 owner who visited with his wife and neighbor.

Also on display for a limited time was Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, which served popcorn and interacted playfully with guests. Less than 24 hours after opening, the line to order food stretched around the block.

Musk has said that if the concept proves successful, Tesla may open similar diner Supercharger stations in other major cities.

Watch the video to see what it’s like inside Tesla’s first diner charging station. 

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