(Photo: Andrej Sokolow, Getty Images)

Thick frames, full hearts

Either Zuck or nothing

Do you want chunky glasses called "Orion"? That's what Meta thinks you want.

9/25/24 3:30PM

Mark Zuckerberg just wrapped up the keynote address at Meta Connect, the company’s annual developer conference.

Clad in an oversized black T-shirt emblazoned with Latin text reading “aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Either Zuck or nothing”), the Meta CEO ran through several tech demos, suffered some minor glitches, and talked about Dame Judy Dench, avocado smoothies, cattle ranching tips, and showed off some THICK prototype holographic glasses.

Zuckerberg noted that the company’s multi-year effort working on glasses, AI, and mixed reality are starting to bear fruit.

“We can start to see how the future of computing and the future of human connection are going to look, and it's pretty awesome,” said Zuckerberg.

It’s also going to look a little weird! The big reveal at the end of the keynote was a pair of holographic augmented reality glasses called “Orion” that the company has been working on for a decade, according to Zuckerberg.

Unlike Apple’s face-hugging Vision Pro, Orion glasses look like — glasses — albeit so thick they look like they were pulled off the face of a Pixar character.

In a video of people’s reactions, the prototype glasses elicited a chorus of "that’s crazy" from various tech buddies such as digital marketer Gary Vaynerchuk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

It sounded like Orion wasn’t going to be ready to ship for a long time, probably due to the expense of the novel technology, which uses “tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses that shoot light into waveguides that have nanoscale 3D structures etched into the lenses,” Zuckerberg said. According to reporting from The Verge, the first generation of these expensive glasses will likely never in fact be sold to the public, who will have to wait for Orion’s second generation.

Other demos featured live language translation through Ray-Ban Meta glasses, AI-powered video translations of Instagram Reels, and virtual AI avatars that could answer questions on your behalf for... all your many fans?

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5