Facebook: Meta's flagship platform is still growing

2/5/23 7:00PM

Maximum efficiency‍‍

Meta’s share price soared nearly 20% on Friday, after an earnings report in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg heralded 2023 as the “year of efficiency” for the company that turned 19 on Saturday.

Admittedly, when Zuck founded the company it looked a lot different. Meta, or Facebook, or The Facebook, started life as a simple online student directory, rather than the tech behemoth that is currently preoccupied with building a — very expensive — virtual world for work and play.

‍Not dead yet

‍Even though the founder’s focus has obviously shifted in the intervening years, the social heart of the tech giant is still beating as strongly as ever as Facebook prepares to enter its third decade.

Indeed, the number of active Facebookers hasn’t really stopped growing. At the end of 2022, Meta revealed that a staggering 2 billion people log in every single day to like, post and poke on Facebook. That means that nearly 40% of all global internet users are on Facebook daily. The figures become even more mind-boggling when you take into account Meta's full "family of apps" (WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram), which reported 2.96 billion daily active users, meaning not far off 60% of all internet users log into a Meta product everyday.

Jon Keegan2h

Anthropic reportedly doubles current fundraising round to $20 billion

Anthropic has doubled its current fundraising round to $20 billion on strong investor demand, according reporting from the Financial Times. The new fundraising round would value the company at a staggering $350 billion. That’s up 91% from September, when it raised at a valuation of $183 billion.

The company reportedly received interest totaling 5x to 6x its original $10 billion fundraising goal, and it’s expected to haul in several billion more than that tally before the current round closes.

Anthropic’s success with enterprise customers and the popularity of its Claude Code product are boosting the company’s momentum as it chases the current valuation leader of the AI startup pack: OpenAI.

Anthropic doubles VC fundraising to $20bn on surging investor demand

Produce At Whole Foods Market's Flagship Store

Amazon says it’s doubling down on opening Whole Foods stores. That sounds familiar.

The company says it’ll open 100 Whole Foods locations in the next few years. That sounds similar to plans Whole Foods’ CEO laid out in 2024 for opening 30 stores a year. Since then, it appears to have added 14, total.

Rani Molla4h

One year after the DeepSeek freak, the AI industry has adjusted and roared back

A look back at how the Chinese startup shattered conventions, changed the way Big Tech thought about AI, and blew a $1 trillion hole in the stock market that got filled right back up... and then soared to new levels.

Jon Keegan4h

Jon Keegan7h

Georgia lawmakers introduce data center construction moratorium amid statewide pushback

More and more communities across the US are wrestling with the pros and cons of having a data center come to town. Georgia has become a hotspot of resistance to the data centers planned by Big Tech, according to a new report from The Guardian. The Atlanta metro area led the nation in data center construction in 2024.

Georgia state representatives introduced legislation that would place a one-year moratorium on data center construction in the state. Ten Georgia municipalities have already passed local bans on data centers.

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

Georgia leads push to ban datacenters used to power America’s AI boom

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

Rani Molla

Tesla’s Robotaxi is way cheaper than Uber, Lyft, or Waymo — but you’ll have to wait a lot longer for one

New data from ride-share comparison app Obi shows how much cheaper and less available Tesla’s autonomous ride-share service is.

Self Driving Taxi Company Waymo Voluntarily Issues Software Recall Over Cars Not Stopping For School Buses