• Google announced 100 updates at I/O, aiming to dominate the AI landscape.
• Google's AI model Gemini will integrate into Chrome, challenging OpenAI's ChatGPT.
• Google's strategy shows ambition but risks a lack of focus amid competition from OpenAI.

Google made literally 100 announcements at I/O this week, a clear sign that the tech giant intends to dominate every aspect of AI, from its overhaul of Search to its latest AI models and wearables tech.

The event was packed and, at times, felt electrifying. Google showed impressive stats about how its AI has taken off. It had plenty of far-out goals, too, like building a universal AI assistant and extended reality glasses that give directions in real time.

I/O also showcased Google's vulnerabilities. Some releases clearly overlapped, while arch-rival OpenAI upstaged Google on Wednesday with a big announcement of its own.

With the conference now over, here are six main takeaways.

Google wants a 'total overhaul' of Search

The biggest change touted at I/O was AI Mode — what CEO Sundar Pichai called a "total overhaul" of Google's most iconic feature. In AI Mode, users will have a far more conversational Search experience, asking Google questions directly about what they're looking for.

That's a marked change from the traditional experience of going through a long list of links to find the right answer, which feels more clunky than ever in an age of AI chatbots.

At the same time, AI features like these could cannibalize Google Search and threaten the tech giant's main cash cow, Google Ads. Google risks not figuring out how to heavily monetize these AI tools. That being said, it's already testing ads in AI Mode.

Gemini everywhere

Google's AI model family, Gemini, took center stage at I/O. Google announced that it will integrate Gemini into Chrome, allowing users to chat with its latest AI models while they browse. (The feature rolls out to subscribers this summer.) It's a shot across the bow to OpenAI's ChatGPT, which already has a popular Chrome extension.

I/O also announced an array of updates to its Gemini app, which recently passed 400 million monthly active users — an impressive figure, though still behind ChatGPT. With an update called Personal Context, Gemini app users can get tailored responses based on personal data from Google services, like asking its AI to find a long-lost email.

It's all part of a long-term plan to build a universal AI assistant: what Google calls Project Astra. While it's still unfinished, that plan feels more fleshed out now than when Business Insider tested Astra a year ago.

Soaring AI traction

New AI features are undeniably cool, though Google's AI traction garnered some of the biggest reactions at Pichai's keynote speech on Tuesday.

Onstage, Pichai boasted that the number of tokens generated by Google across all its platforms a month had exploded 50 times to over 480 trillion since last year.

The crowd gasped—it was a big moment. Last year's I/O felt like a giant teaser for coming AI features, with plenty of promise but little to show for it. This year felt different.

Sergey Brin goes founder mode

There was no greater manifestation of Google tripling down on AI than cofounder Sergey Brin crashing a fireside chat with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. That was after Brin wandered around a pavilion trying on a pair of Google's XR glasses.

At the chat, Brin said he goes into the office "pretty much every day now" to work on AI. He also said that retired computer scientists should get back to work to take advantage of the current environment.

Brin has been back at Google since 2023 as the search giant races against AI rivals, and it's obvious he's in "founder mode" — something quite rare at a mature company.

Google's smart glasses are here — sort of

Google let BI briefly try on its prototype Android XR glasses, which have Gemini's AI features and allow users to ask questions. While the tech shows promise, it's still early days. Google staffers asked the throngs of I/O attendees lining up for demos not to ask about price, availability, or battery life.

"We just don't know!" they said.

The prototype glasses feel impressively lightweight — almost too much so, to the point that they felt like they might fall off our faces. The display sits only on the right lens and is practically invisible unless viewed at just the right angle under the right light. It's full-color, but it's small and subtle enough that you might miss the display entirely.

We weren't allowed to view Google Maps or Photos in the glasses like Google showed off in its keynote. Instead, we put on the glasses and walked around a room filled with artwork on the walls and travel catalogs on a table that we could ask Gemini questions about.

While Gemini correctly identified the artwork, it couldn't answer a basic travel query when we looked at the travel catalogs: "What is the cheapest flight to New York next month?" And because the display is only on one side, focusing on it made us feel a bit cross-eyed.

The version we saw isn't the final design. It's missing the coming Warby Parker and Gentle Monster flair, though we did see glimmers of something promising here.

Throwing everything against the wall may or may not work

Google's announcements are undeniably impressive, though some of them felt repetitive. It's hard to understand the difference between Search Live and Gemini Live, for example. Both of them involve chatting with your phone about what it sees through its camera.

Google's strategy of launching literally 100 different things at once could work for the company. It could also signal a lack of focus.

BI was at an I/O panel when the news broke that OpenAI was buying former Apple design chief Jony Ive's hardware startup. Seeing OpenAI upstage Google like that felt a little ominous.

The Google panel BI attended was quite dry and technical, with terms like AI-powered "tool calling" mentioned several times. The contrast with OpenAI's buzzy announcement couldn't be clearer. We even saw several attendees check their phones when the news came out.

Google does have massive advantages in scale and distribution, thanks to Android and Chrome.

Still, it's possible that in the long term, something like an AI-native device that ditches Google's ecosystem altogether eventually takes over.

Investors got a taste of that risk last month, when the stock of Google's parent company, Alphabet, briefly tanked after Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue said search volume was shrinking due to AI.

• Meta has instructed managers to rank more employees in its "below expectations" performance rating.
• The midyear reviews could set the stage for more performance-based cuts.
• The move follows CEO Mark Zuckerberg's internal announcement to "move out low-performers" faster.

Meta is expanding the ranks of its lowest-rated employees in their midyear performance reviews, months after it laid off nearly 4,000 employees whom it labeled low performers.

It's telling managers to put more employees in its "below expectations" tier, the lowest performance bucket, during this year's midyear performance reviews, according to a memo shared on Meta's internal forum on May 14, which was viewed by Business Insider. For teams of 150 or more, Meta wants managers to put 15% to 20% of employees in the bottom bucket compared with 12% to 15% last year.

The expanded range includes employees who have already left the company as part of "nonregrettable attrition," Meta's term for staff considered noncritical to operations, including those who resigned or were dismissed for underperformance.

The midyear performance review process is "an opportunity to make exit decisions," the memo said. It added that "there will be no company-wide performance terminations, unlike earlier this year," and that leaders are expected to manage the performance of their reports.

Managers can select employees for performance cuts based on criteria including a "below expectations" rating in their midyear review, if they were formally disciplined within the past six months, or if they had an "employee relations" case in the first quarter. Those cases are when an employee was on a plan to manage their performance.

The review process is set to begin on June 16, and conversations between managers and employees on performance are scheduled for between July and August.

The change comes just months after Meta laid off nearly 4,000 employees — about 5% of its workforce — over their performance. Internal documents seen by BI earlier this year suggested such layoffs could become an annual fixture, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling staff he had "decided to raise the bar on performance management" and move faster to "move out low-performers."

Meta declined to comment.

The new midyear targets echo a move Meta made at the end of 2022, when it roughly doubled the share of employees placed in its lowest performance categories during annual reviews. At the time, managers were instructed to classify up to 16.5% of staff as underperformers, up from the previous range of 7% to 12%.

As with the current midyear cycle, that figure included employees already marked for nonregrettable attrition. The company also told managers to be more rigorous when evaluating employees on the borderline between performance tiers.

The repeated tightening of performance review criteria underscores Meta's effort to reshape its workforce following years of overhiring. Meta executives have increasingly used performance management as a mechanism to streamline teams and cut costs. Meta's human resources leaders have emphasized a need to "move faster" in managing out underperformers so that new, stronger talent could be brought in.

Meta's move mirrors a broader trend in the tech industry, where companies are sharpening their focus on performance, while doubling down on artificial intelligence investments. Earlier this month, Microsoft said it would cut about 6,000 roles — roughly 3% of its global workforce — in an effort to trim layers of middle management and boost the ratio of coders to noncoders on projects. At Google, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees late last year that the company had reduced its top management ranks by 10% as part of an efficiency push.

Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at [email protected] or Signal at 1-408-905-9124. Contact Jyoti Mann via email at [email protected] or Signal at jyotimann.11. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Google announced a partnership with Warby Parker for smart glasses, challenging Meta's Ray-Ban line.
• The collaboration includes an investment of up to $150 million, with up to $75 million toward development.
• Google's Android XR platform includes see-through headsets and glasses that support AR and AI.

Google is taking aim at Meta's Ray-Ban glasses with a version of its own AI eyewear line, styled by Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.

"We want you to be able to wear glasses that match your personal taste," Google's Android XR lead Shahram Izadi said at Google I/O.

The glasses are part of Google's Android XR platform and are a partnership with Samsung, the company announced at its Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday. The platform includes see-through headsets, as well as glasses that support augmented reality and AI.

Google and Warby Parker plan to launch a series of products, with the first line of smart glasses with multimodal AI set to launch after 2025, an announcement from the lifestyle vision brand said. Android XR will also include Project Moohan, the first Android XR headset device, which will come out later this year.

Google has committed up to $150 million to the partnership, with as much as $75 million going toward product development and commercialization costs, and up to $75 million in equity, the announcement said. Warby Parker's stock is up nearly 15% following the news about the collaboration.

At the event, Izadi said the glasses prototypes "are already being used by trusted testers." The Google VP didn't share further details on availability or pricing. While Gentle Monster defines itself as a luxury eyewear brand, Warby Parker is better known for offering stylish but affordable options.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg projected in January that 2025 could be a "defining year" for the brand's Ray-Ban smart glasses, even if it's not a breakthrough.

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, which don't yet include AR capabilities, have become one of the company's few mainstream hardware hits. They allow users to take photos, livestream, and access Meta AI via voice.

During the company's latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said sales of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses had "tripled" over the past year. Meta's Ray Bans cost between $300 and $500.

Later this year, Meta is expected to release a new version of the Ray-Bans with a built-in display, its first step toward augmented reality in a mass-market product. According to Bloomberg, the upcoming model could cost between $1,000 and $1,400.

Meanwhile, Meta is developing a separate, more ambitious line of AR glasses, internally codenamed "Artemis," which it aims to release by 2027. These are distinct from both the Ray-Bans and "Orion," an early prototype Meta unveiled last year as a preview of its AR ambitions.

Google is taking aim at Orion with its own "Project Aura" glasses, part of its broader Android XR platform. Google's Aura glasses include a built-in camera, microphone, speakers, and in-lens display, and they are already being tested.

Google has been exploring the concept of smart glasses for over a decade, and it's had some flops along the way — like Google Glass, which was discontinued in 2023, after launching in 2013. Last year at I/O, Google teased Project Astra, a vision of what Google Assistant could be like if it could hear and see around you. Google CEO Sundar Pichai hinted that Google was "working on prototypes" for the AI assistant that could be glasses.

Google did a live demo of the Project Aura glasses on Tuesday at I/O, showing how users could message friends, make appointments, ask for directions, and take photos. It also demoed a live language translation, which appeared a bit glitchy in the onstage demonstration, but still offered an impressive first look at what the tech could offer.

Google I/O also included a series of other product rollouts and AI updates, including a conversation version of Search called AI Mode, as well as gen-AI media models like Veo 3, and Imagen 4.

• Meta's Llama 4 models had a lukewarm start and haven't seen as much adoption as past models.
• The muted reception of Meta's latest models has some questioning its relevance.
• Developers told Business Insider Llama slipped from the cutting edge, but it still plays a key role.

At LlamaCon, Meta's first-ever conference focused on its open-source large language models held last month, developers were left wanting.

Several of them told Business Insider they expected a reasoning model to be announced at the inaugural event and would have even settled for a traditional model that can beat alternatives like DeepSeek's V3 and Qwen, a group of models built by Alibaba's cloud firm.

A month earlier, Meta released the fourth generation of its Llama family of LLMs, including two open-weight models: Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick. Scout is designed to run on a single graphics processing unit, but with the performance of a larger model, and Maverick is a larger version meant to compete with other foundation models.

Alongside Scout and Maverick, Meta also previewed Llama 4 Behemoth, a much larger "teacher model" still in training. It is designed for distillation, which enables the creation of smaller, specialized models from a larger one.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Behemoth would be delayed, and that the entire suite of models was struggling to compete. Meta said these models achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Meta's Llama used to be a big deal. But now it's sliding farther down the AI world's leaderboards, and to some, its relevance is fading.

"It would be exciting if they were beating Qwen and DeepSeek," Vineeth Sai Varikuntla, a developer working on medical AI applications, told BI at the conference last month. "Qwen is ahead, way ahead of what they are doing in general use cases and reasoning."

The disappointment reflected a growing sense among some developers and industry observers that Meta's once-exciting open-source models are losing momentum, both in technical performance and developer mindshare.

While Meta continues to tout its commitment to openness, ecosystem-building, and innovation, rivals like DeepSeek, Qwen, and OpenAI are setting a faster pace in areas like reasoning, tool use, and real-world deployment.

Meta aimed to reassert its leadership in open-source AI. Instead, it raised fresh questions about whether Llama is keeping up.

"We're constantly listening to feedback from the developer community and our partners to make our models and features even better and look forward to working with the community to continue iterating and unlocking their value," Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels told BI.

A promising start

In 2023, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the launch of Llama 2 "probably the biggest event in AI" that year. By July 2024, the release of Llama 3 was held up as a breakthrough — the first open large language model that could compete with OpenAI.

Llama 3 created an immediate surge in demand for computing power, SemiAnalysis Chief Analyst Dylan Patel told BI at the time."The moment Meta's new model was released, there was a big shift. Prices went up for renting GPUs."

Google searches containing "Meta" and "Llama" similarly peaked in late July 2024.

Llama 3 was an American-made, open, top-of-the-line LLM. Though Llama never consistently topped the leaderboard on industry benchmarks, it's traditionally been influential — relevant.

But that has started to change.

The models introduced a new-to-Meta architecture called "mixture of experts," which was popularized by China's DeepSeek.

The architecture allows the model to activate only the most relevant expertise for a given task, making a large model function more efficiently, like a smaller one.

Llama 4's debut quickly met criticism when developers noticed that the version Meta used for public benchmarking was not the same version available for download and deployment. This prompted accusations that Meta was gaming the leaderboard. The company denied this, saying the variant in question was experimental and that evaluating multiple versions of a model is standard practice.

While competing models paced out ahead, Meta looked rudderless.

"It did seem like a bit of a marketing push for Llama," said Mahesh Sathiamoorthy, cofounder of Bespoke Labs, a Mountain View-based startup that creates AI tools for data curation and training LLMs, previously told BI.

There's no singular resource that can measure which model or family of models is winning with developers. But what data exists shows Llama's latest models aren't among the leaders.

Qwen, in particular, hovers around the top of leaderboards across the internet.

Artificial Analysis is a site that ranks models based on performance, and when it comes to intelligence, it places Llama 4 Maverick and Scout just above OpenAI's GPT-4 model, released at the end of last year, and below xAI's Grok and Anthropic's Claude.

Openrouter offers a platform for developers to access various models and then publishes leaderboards for model use through its own API. It shows Lama 3.3 among the top 20 models used as of early May, but not Llama 4.

"They wanted to cast a wider net and appeal to enterprises, but I think the technical community was looking for more substantial model improvements," Sathiamoorthy said.

More than a model

The standard evaluations of Llama 4 released to the public were lackluster, according to experts.

But the muted enthusiasm for Llama 4, compared to Llama 3, goes beyond the model itself, AJ Kourabi, an analyst at SemiAnalysis focused on models, told BI.

"Sometimes it's not the evals that necessarily matter. It's the tool-calling and capability for the model to extend beyond just being a chatbot," Kourabi said.

"Tool-calling" is a model's ability to access and instruct other applications on the internet or on a user's computer or device. It's essential for agentic AI, which promises to eventually book our airline tickets and file our work expenses.

Meta told BI that Llama models support tool-calling, including through its API in preview.

Theo Browne, a YouTuber and developer whose company, Ping, builds AI software for other developers, told BI that tool-calling is increasingly important as agentic tools are coming into focus, and it is almost a requirement for cutting-edge relevance.

Anthropic was an early leader in this, and other proprietary models like OpenAI are catching up, Browne said.

"Having a model that will reliably call the right tool to get the right information to generate the right response is incredibly valuable, and OpenAI went from kind of ignoring this to seemingly being all in on tools," Browne said.

Kourabi says the biggest indicator that Meta has fallen behind is the absence of a reasoning model, perhaps an even more fundamental element in the agentic AI equation.

"The reasoning model is the main thing, because when we think about what has unlocked a lot of these agentic capabilities, it's the ability to reason through a specific task, and to decide what to do," he said.

Llama: Who is it good for?

Some see Llama 4 as evidence that Meta is falling behind, but like Meta's foundational product, Facebook, AI practitioners say, it's still almost impossible to write it off.

Nate Jones, the head of product at RockerBox, offers advice to young developers through his Substack, YouTube, and TikTok. He encourages them to put Llama and any other models they're intimately familiar with on their résumés.

"In 2025, people will already have Llama in their stack and they will look for people who have worked with it," Jones said.

Paul Baier, the CEO and principal analyst at GAI Insights, consults with companies on AI projects, with an emphasis on non-tech companies. He said Llama is likely to stay in the mix of many, if not most, of his clients.

"Enterprises continue to see that open source is an important part to have in the mix of their intelligence," Baier told BI. Open models, Llama most prominent among them, can handle less complicated tasks and keep costs down. "They want closed and open," Baier said.

And that's what many developers think too, Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, said.

"When our customers evaluate models, they are rarely looking at these benchmarks," Gultekin said. "Instead, they'll evaluate these models on their own problem statement. Given the very low cost, Llama is sufficient."

At Snowflake, Llama powers workloads like summarizing sales call transcripts and extracting structured information from customer reviews. At data platform company Dremio, Llama generates structured query language code and writes marketing emails.

"For 80% of applications, the model probably doesn't matter," Tomer Shiran, cofounder and chief product officer at Dremio, told BI. "All the models now are good enough. OpenAI, Llama, Claude, Gemini — they all meet a specific need that the user has."

Llama may be slipping away from direct competition with the proprietary models, at least for now. But other analysis suggests that the field is diversifying, and Llama's role in it is solidifying.

Benchmarks are not what drives model choice a lot of the time.

"Everybody's just testing it on their own use cases," said Shiran. "It's the customer's data, and it's also going to keep changing."

Gultekin added: "They usually make these decisions not as a one-time thing, but rather per use case."

Llama may be losing developers like Browne, who breathlessly await the next toy from a company on the frontier. But the rest of the developer world, the one that's just trying to make AI-powered tools that work, Llama hasn't lost them yet. That means Llama's potential could still be intact.

It's also part of an open-source playbook Zuckerberg has used since 2013, when the company launched React, a library for building consumer interfaces that's still in use.

PyTorch is a machine learning framework created in 2016 that overtook Google's similar effort. Meta transferred PyTorch to the Linux Foundation in 2022 to maintain its neutrality.

"If Meta anchors another successful ecosystem, Meta gets a lot of labor from the open-source community," RockerBox's Jones said. "Zuckerberg gets tailwinds that he wouldn't have had otherwise."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at 443-333-9088. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified in Meta's antitrust trial on Thursday.
• The FTC claims Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp created an illegal monopoly.
• Regulators want Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri took the witness stand on Thursday in Meta's landmark antitrust trial in Washington, DC, federal court.

Mosseri, who has been at the helm of Instagram since 2018, is among the more than two dozen witnesses that the Federal Trade Commission has called to testify in the case.

The FTC argues in its case against Meta that the company violated antitrust laws when it "helped cement" an illegal monopoly in the social networking market with its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and the messaging app WhatsApp two years later.

The case, to be decided by Judge James Boasberg, could be one of the most consequential antitrust trials in years. If FTC regulators have their way, Meta could be forced to sell off WhatsApp and Instagram.

Mosseri began his tenure at Meta, formerly called Facebook, in 2008. Here are five insights and revelations we learned from his more than six hours of testimony:

Mark Zuckerberg's 'strained' relationship with Instagram's founders

Mosseri recalled a 2018 email he sent to Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg while on paternity leave, warning that Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were increasingly frustrated with strategy changes.

He wrote that it was "hard for me to get a read on what's going on as the relationship was strained."

Mosseri cited two core tensions: Zuckerberg's belief that slowing Instagram's growth would benefit Meta overall.

Mosseri acted as a mediator, relaying concerns between the founders and Facebook leadership.

These tensions foreshadowed a deeper rift that culminated in the cofounders' departure later that year, a turning point that saw Mosseri take over the reins at Instagram.

Worry over TikTok cutting into Instagram's growth

TikTok's meteoric rise was a massive threat to Instagram, Meta has argued.

"TikTok is probably the fiercest competition we have faced during my tenure at the company," Mosseri testified on Thursday.

According to internal Meta documents presented in court, TikTok was a "big concern" in 2019, just as the ByteDance-owned app was taking off. Instagram data scientists presented a "conservative estimate" that 40% of Instagram's year-over-year decline in time spent was due to TikTok. Specifically in the US, Instagram estimated a 23% decline in time spent.

Instagram would go on to launch its own short-form video product, Reels, in 2020.

Mosseri also testified that he briefed Zuckerberg "very often" about the competition with TikTok, adding that there was a monthly dinner with the most senior executives at Meta where this would come up.

"It became kind of a hazing ritual for me to give an update on Reels," Mosseri said.

Mosseri's 'biggest mistake'

On the stand, Mosseri testified that Instagram's first version of Reels was his "biggest mistake," built on the "not a sound foundation" of Stories, which the feature was initially built into.

The feature flopped and was ultimately scrapped after nearly a year. Mosseri said before he joined Instagram that it tried another venture to compete with TikTok called IGTV — that too failed.

Instagram pivoted by relaunching Reels as a dedicated feature in the main feed, a reboot that finally gained traction amid the pandemic and TikTok's rapid rise. Mosseri said that the company "could have and should have been more aggressive" in responding to what he called Meta's fiercest competitor.

Hundreds of millions on content creators

Instagram's fight with TikTok and other apps is just beginning, Mosseri testified.
Mosseri said that one of the biggest fights right now is over future creators, those who are just beginning to make content or who haven't even started. He said TikTok has done a better job allowing small creators to rapidly expand their reach, something Meta is actively trying to cut into.

In terms of overall investment, Mosseri said that Meta has spent "hundreds of millions, maybe a billion or two" during his time at the company supporting the wider creative ecosystem.

That touches everything from incentive payments to the physical infrastructure necessary to power Instagram's AI-backed recommendations.

"We are just seeing more and more power shift from institutions to individuals across the industry," Mosseri testified.

Instagram's struggles around content safety

Susan Musser, the FTC attorney who led Mosseri's questioning, repeatedly questioned the Instagram head over his initial concerns about how the app was ensuring the safety of its content.

Mosser pointed to an email from October 19, 2018, less than a month after Mosseri became head of the app, in which he said that Facebook was not investing enough in Instagram's Well-being team.

"I think we're underinvested in Well-being and were, until recently, the resources we do have are underleveraged," Mosseri wrote to someone whose full name was redacted. The initial email the person wrote was titled, "need to prioritize integrity efforts over growth — we must fight fakes."

An internal Facebook document also showed that Instagram had significantly fewer engineers devoted to well-being than the main app. According to the 2018 summary, Instagram had 40 engineers dedicated to doing such work. Facebook had 900.

Meta lawyer Aaron Panner later asked Mosseri if Meta employees typically received everything they requested.

"Never," Mosseri said.

• Dan Reed, COO of Meta's Reality Labs, is stepping down after nearly 11 years.
• Reed's exit follows a major restructuring of Reality Labs, integrating it with Meta's core.
• Despite growth, Reality Labs has incurred over $60 billion in losses since 2020.

Dan Reed, the chief operating officer of Meta's Reality Labs division, is stepping down after nearly 11 years at the company.

Reed's departure marks another leadership change at a time when the division faces mounting internal and external pressure.

Reed announced his exit Wednesday in a LinkedIn post, reflecting on his time building what he described as a "fast-growing, multibillion-dollar consumer technology business" spanning AI wearables, augmented and mixed reality, and the metaverse.

"I see SO much exciting opportunity in this space, to which I eventually intend to return to lead and grow something cool and exciting," Reed wrote. "In the meantime, I'm very excited after this 20+ year run to take an extended break and spend quality time with my wife and two boys, reconnect with friends and family, and recharge."

Reed, a former NBA executive, first joined Meta in 2014 to lead the company's partnerships with sports teams and athletes.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reed's departure follows Meta's major restructuring of Reality Labs earlier this year. Business Insider first reported in January that the company began integrating Reality Labs more closely with its core business. This shift reversed parts of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 reorganization, which had positioned the group as a stand-alone, metaverse-focused division.

Under the new structure, sales, marketing, and analytics teams that once reported to Reed were redistributed under broader Meta leadership. Meta COO Javier Olivan now oversees the teams previously led by Reed, and other Reality Labs leaders have been aligned with top company executives, including chief marketing officer Alex Schultz and head of partnerships Justin Osofsky.

Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, credited Reed at the time for guiding the business group through a phase of rapid growth. An internal memo viewed by BI in January said that Reality Labs' sales rose over 40% year-over-year in 2024, and the division beat nearly all of its aggressive sales and user goals. Bosworth called Reed's leadership "a major part" of that success.

Despite those gains, Reality Labs remains a financial sinkhole for Meta. The division, which includes the Quest headsets, Horizon Worlds, and Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, has racked up more than $60 billion in losses since 2020.

Last month, Meta laid off staff across Reality Labs, including teams working on VR gaming and the Supernatural fitness app.

Internally, Bosworth has described 2025 as "the most critical" year for the division and said that Meta's ambitious metaverse bets could either validate years of investment or be remembered as a "legendary misadventure."

Do you work for Meta or have a tip or an insight to share? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Meta employees let go for "low performance" describe gaslighting, golden handcuffs, and toxicity.
• From medical leave to an offer to be rehired, former employees share details of their termination.
• Former employees detail their experiences and what led up to their firings.

Months after Meta's high-profile culling of low performers, the stigma associated with the job cuts still stings.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push to "raise the bar on performance" saw about 5% of its workforce — roughly 3,600 employees — laid off in a sweeping round of cuts in February. The company said it targeted its lowest performers, but some former employees pushed back on that.

Some said they had received positive ratings months earlier. Others said they were on medical or parental leave, mid-transfer between teams, or hadn't received a formal rating yet. Some speculated that conflict with a manager was the deciding factor. As of late April, laid-off employees received severance payouts.

The eight accounts below offer a sense of how employees who were let go experienced the cuts and their concern about how it could affect their future. BI has verified the performance records of these ex-workers, who asked for anonymity because they fear the "low performer" label could hurt future job prospects.

A Meta spokesperson reiterated what the company previously shared with BI earlier this year about its low-performer cuts: "Let me be clear, these were performance-based terminations," the spokesperson said. "Prior ratings were not downgraded. Simply because someone had a history of meeting or exceeding expectations does not mean they continue to consistently meet the bar."

The spokesperson added that Meta employees are held accountable to a goal-based culture of high performance.

"Just part of Mark's mandate"

A former employee in Meta's human resources division had returned to work after being on parental leave for nearly five months when his division lost close to 10% of its staff. His mid-year review put him "At or Above Expectations" — the middle tier — but his year-end rating was "Meets Most," which made him eligible for termination.

"I tried calling my boss immediately, but in my heart, I knew it probably wasn't an error — Meta wouldn't make a mistake that significant." He said the manager was distressed but repeated: "I can't say anything. It's just part of Mark's mandate. It's a hard year."

He said he didn't know why he had been downgraded. "We can't even see the feedback our managers wrote for us," he said.

"Once the shock wore off, there was actually a mix of emotions — including some relief at being freed from that situation." But he does worry about carrying the low-performer label.

"It's one thing to be let go in a restructuring," he said. "It's another to have your professional reputation potentially damaged by being mischaracterized as an underperformer."

Cut, then recruited

A former senior machine learning engineer at Meta described the shock of being laid off, only for a Meta recruiter to invite her to reapply three days later and skip the interview process.

"Same email address. Same person. No acknowledgment of what had just happened. It felt surreal," she said.

She said she joined Meta in early 2024 and earned a mid-year review of "At or Above Expectations." Initially rated "Meets All Expectations" in the January 2025 year-end review, she was downgraded to "Meets Most Expectations" after a second round of director-level reviews. She said she suspects "directors were under pressure to hit a layoff quota."

Before the layoff, she was dissatisfied with her manager and sought a transfer to a top-tier team. It was approved, but she was told the move could lower her rating, so she waited — only to be pink-slipped. She said she's not taking the recruiter up on her offer.

Ultimately, she's confident she can land or create her next opportunity.

"I'll be fine. I can get another job or start something of my own."

Cut after a leave for burnout

A software engineer who joined Meta in May 2024 to work on cross-platform content sharing said a promising start unraveled due to internal politics over a new feature he prototyped. He said he took a four-month leave for burnout in August and returned in December to complete two more projects.

Two weeks before the layoffs, he said, his new manager told the team everyone was "safe." Then came the termination email — and a performance rating of "Meets Some Expectations," low on Meta's end-of-year rating scale.

"How could they evaluate my performance when I'd only worked 10 weeks in 2024?" he said, adding that an HR director had said he was "too new to evaluate."

Although he's now fielding interest from other companies and expects to receive 16 weeks of severance, he still feels the sting of his rating. "The harmful 'low performer' label still feels wrong," he said.

"Everything changed when I moved to Reality Labs"

A product manager joined Facebook as a contractor in 2018, converted to full-time in 2020, and consistently received year-end "Greatly Exceeds Expectations" ratings label.

In 2023, when she moved to Reality Labs, "everything changed," she said.

"My manager would call late at night to question my capabilities and create doubt, even though teammates gave me positive feedback," she said.

A review in early 2024 dropped her two tiers to "Meets All Expectations." Feedback included accusations that she was "blinded" by a "desire for promotion," she said. In August 2024, she took a 12-week disability leave "because I was physically ill from all the stress." She returned in November and was laid off in February.

She's being "selective" in her hunt for a new job. "The experience damaged my health, affected my family, and forced me onto medication for anxiety. I need to walk away from toxicity at the first sign, not wait until it affects my health and family again."

A templated response

This technical program manager was laid off after seven years of good performance ratings at Meta.

A reorganization placed her under a new manager a few months earlier — a shift she felt exposed her. "When managers have to meet quotas and choose someone to cut, people with less history on the team are at higher risk," she said.

"I contacted my manager in shock" after the termination notice, she said. "I just wanted five minutes to talk to ensure I wasn't going crazy." The manager responded with a templated email — the same company-approved language she had been required to use the day before when laying off her own direct report.

She still doesn't know exactly what led to their selection. "Was it because I had significant equity vested when the stock price was low?" she said. " Was it because I expressed disappointment about Meta rolling back DEI programs on internal forums? I'll never know — but there's clearly more to this story than simply cutting the lowest performers."

"The Hunger Games, but for high performers"

After 14 years at Google and three at Meta, this program manager said she was laid off despite a strong performance record: "At Meta, I'd even received 'Exceeds Expectations' and the rare 'Redefines Expectations.'" She said her manager told her she was doing "a great job" at the midyear review.

"I was candid with my manager — sometimes critically, but always constructively — about where I thought things could improve," she said. "I was transparent about how stress in my personal life was affecting me: my husband had been laid off, and we were caring for a special-needs child."

She said the manager said not to worry, but she had noticed a shift in tone at Meta — for example, CTO Andrew "Boz" Bozworth saying a worker who alleged mistreatment should just quit.

"The compassionate tone of the 2022 layoffs — the regret, the messaging about hard decisions — feels like a distant memory," she said. "This round was cutthroat. Silent. Cold. The Hunger Games, but for high performers."

"I wrote a final email to my skip-level manager," she added. "Not to get my job back. Not even to get a reply (I didn't). I just wanted to be heard. To say: I know I did good work. I know I didn't deserve this. And I hope someone — anyone — in leadership still has the humanity to care."

"This was about filling quotas"

This employee spent four years at Meta working on internal security systems, including tools to manage insider threats. He spent the weekend before the cuts making sure those would run smoothly on the day of the layoffs.

He had received consistently strong performance ratings, and said his managers agreed he was on track, but his termination letter assigned him a "Meets Most Expectations" rating. He said his managers didn't look at the self-review he submitted. "That told me everything. This wasn't about performance," he said. "This was about filling quotas."

"My manager said he 'stood by' the rating but wished he'd had more time and freedom to talk things through."

In his view, the company culture had grown increasingly cutthroat, with employees clinging to projects to boost their ratings, jockeying within the performance curve, and seeing dissent increasingly punished.

"Many people stay because the compensation is hard to walk away from, not because they believe in the mission. I was one of them. It was a place that offered scale and learning, but at a steep emotional cost," he said, adding that his healthy salary would have made him "an easy target" for cost-cutters.

"Companies can quietly rewrite the story of your career"

An engineer was laid off after five months of leave for a serious health crisis while in the middle of disability-related negotiations. He said his final performance rating — "Meets Most Expectations" — felt like "a scarlet letter."

"I wasn't underperforming," he said. Peer reviews before the leave had been entirely positive, and he saved "screenshots of it all for my lawyer."

His compensation exceeded $500,000, making him the highest-paid person on the team after his manager. He said he worked 60 to 75 hours before falling ill, but he sensed resentment after raising burnout concerns and stepping away from a major project.

"And after the layoff? Nothing. She didn't even say goodbye."

He said Meta's branding of laid-off workers as low performers "sets a dangerous precedent — companies can quietly rewrite the story of your career, and you don't get to fight back."

He's exploring legal options. "Meta is telling one story," he said. "And for many of us, it's not the truth."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• I went to Meta's first AI developer event and left underwhelmed.
• Developers, spectators, and even Mark Zuckerberg seemed to agree that Llama is second to competitors.
• Meta's AI efforts gained Wall Street praise, but its future rests on developer adoption.

On the manicured lawns outside Building 21 on Meta's sprawling Menlo Park headquarters, live llamas meandered with languid indifference, drawing clusters of developers who momentarily abandoned technical discussions for selfies with the stoic, woolly ambassadors of Meta's family of large language models.

Inside Building 21, I shivered. The cavernous auditorium's air conditioning was cranked up high. Mood lighting bathed the space in Meta's signature blue shade, and dance music blasted from speakers, lending a nightclub ambiance to the event that clashed oddly with the earnest, tech-focused agenda.

"Rise and shine!" a Meta PR person chirped as I took a seat.

This was LlamaCon, Meta's first-ever conference for AI developers. Its timing felt oddly defensive. Earlier this year, DeepSeek, an open-source AI model from China that delivered groundbreaking performance with computational efficiency, had much of Silicon Valley, including Meta's AI division, panicked.

Around the same time, Meta announced that it would spend $65 billion in 2025 to build out AI infrastructure. Weeks after that, the company released Llama 4, the latest version of its LLM family. Mark Zuckerberg called it "the beginning of a new era for the Llama ecosystem." Almost immediately after, Meta was accused of artificially inflating Llama models' performance benchmarks, a claim that executives pushed back against.

LlamaCon, I thought, was Meta's moment to reclaim trust and clarify its AI strategy.

Onstage, Meta's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox framed the company's open source strategy as principled rather than reactive: "We were a startup once, too," he said in the keynote. "We built this place on open source."

The subtext was clear: Meta wants developers to see Llama as their path to autonomy and flexibility in an increasingly closed AI ecosystem dominated by offerings from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

Llama knelt to competitors

LlamaCon featured several announcements, including the launch of a new Llama API that Meta says will make it easy for developers to integrate its models using familiar tools and interfaces. Some tasks will be possible with just a few lines of code.

Meta also announced partnerships with companies to make AI run faster; a security program with AT&T and others to fight AI-generated scams; and $1.5 million in grants to startups and universities around the world using Llama.

Conspicuously absent, however, was what many developers had actually come hoping to see: a new reasoning model to compete with what has rapidly become table stakes in the AI industry, including in Chinese open-source alternatives like DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen.

In a conversation with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Zuckerberg seemed to tacitly acknowledge these shortcomings.

"Part of the value around open source is that you can mix and match," he said. "If another model, like DeepSeek, is better, or if Qwen is better at something, then, as developers, you have the ability to take the best parts of the intelligence from different models. This is part of how I think open source basically passes in quality all the closed source [models]…[It] feels like sort of an unstoppable force."

Vineeth Sai Varikuntla, a developer working on medical AI applications, echoed this sentiment when I spoke with him after the keynote.

"It would be exciting if they were beating Qwen and DeepSeek," he said. "I think they will come out with a model soon. But right now the model that they have should be on par—" he paused, reconsidering, "Qwen is ahead, way ahead of what they are doing in general use cases and reasoning."

Missing model improvements

The online reaction to LlamaCon reflected similar disappointment across developer communities.

On Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA, the top post was titled "No new models in LlamaCon announced." Users compared Meta unfavorably to Qwen 3, which Alibaba strategically released just one day before Meta's event.

"Good lord. Llama went from competitively good Open Source to just so far behind the race that I'm beginning to think Qwen and DeepSeek can't even see it in their rear view mirror anymore," wrote one user. Others debated whether Meta had planned to release a reasoning model but pulled back after seeing Qwen's performance.

On Hacker News, a popular forum for developers and tech industry professionals, some criticized the event's focus on API services and partnerships rather than model improvements as "super shallow." And one user on Threads summed up the event simply as "kinda mid."

When I asked Meta how they measured the success of the event, they declined to comment.

"It did seem like a bit of a marketing push for Llama," Mahesh Sathiamoorthy, cofounder of Bespoke Labs, a Mountain View-based startup that creates AI tools for data curation and training LLMs, told me. "They wanted to cast a wider net and appeal to enterprises, but I think the technical community was looking for more substantial model improvements."

Still, LlamaCon won praise from Wall Street analysts tracking the company's AI strategy. "LlamaCon was one giant flex of Meta's ambitions and successes with AI," Mike Proulx of Forrester told me.

Jefferies analyst Brent Thill called Meta's announcement at the event "a big step forward" to becoming a "hyperscaler, a term referring to large cloud serve providers that offer computing resources and infrastructure to businesses.

Some developers using Llama models were equally enthusiastic about the technology's benefits. For Yevhenii Petrenko of Tavus, which creates AI-powered conversational videos, Llama's speed was crucial. "We really care about very low latency, like very fast response, and Llama helps us use other LLMs," he told me after the event.

Hanzla Ramey, CTO of WriteSea, an AI-powered career services platform that helps job seekers prepare résumés and practice interviews, highlighted Llama's cost-effectiveness: "For us, cost is huge," he told me. "We are a startup, so controlling expenses is really important. If we go with closed source, we can't process millions of jobs. No way."

The future's form and function

Toward the end of the day, Zuckerberg joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella onstage for a wide-ranging chat about AI's future. One comment stood out.

Llama 4, Zuckerberg explained, had been designed around Meta's preferred infrastructure — the H100 GPU, which shaped its architecture and scale. But he acknowledged that "a lot of the open source community wants even smaller models." Developers "just need things in different shapes," he said.

"To be able to basically take whatever intelligence you have from bigger models," he added, "and distill them into whatever form factor you want — to be able to run on your laptop, on your phone, on whatever the thing is…to me, this is one of the most important things," he said.

It was a candid admission. For all the pageantry, LlamaCon wasn't a coronation. It was Meta still mid-pivot, trying to convince developers — and maybe itself — that it can build not just models, but momentum.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Activists called on Meta to demand transparency on hate speech handling.
• The proposal demands a report on Meta's moderation of antisemitism and hate speech.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's control over voting shares makes proposal approval unlikely.

Shareholder activists say Meta isn't doing enough to combat hate speech.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Jewish investor network JLens are calling on Meta investors to back a new proposal demanding greater transparency into how the company handles antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-disability hate speech.

The campaign comes amid rising concern over Meta's rollback of moderation policies and signals that investor scrutiny of the company's approach to safety has intensified.

The shareholder proposal, known as Proposal 8, calls on Meta to publish a public report detailing how it identifies, moderates, and addresses hate speech across its platforms. Shareholders will vote on the measure at Meta's annual meeting on May 28.

The report would include data tracking the prevalence of hate speech on Meta's platforms, broken down by the communities targeted, and an analysis of whether such content has increased or decreased under updated policy guidelines. It would also disclose any new policies or product interventions Meta has introduced or is developing to address hate targeting marginalized groups.

Still, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg controls a majority of the company's voting shares through a dual-class stock structure, effectively giving him the power to decide the outcome of any shareholder vote. Even if outside investors broadly support the proposal, it is almost certain to fail without Zuckerberg's backing.

Meta declined to comment.

Meta's board has urged shareholders to vote against the proposal, saying the company already has comprehensive content moderation systems and transparency reports and that an additional report would not provide meaningful new information.

ADL and JLens argue that forcing the issue into public view and onto the ballot is an important step toward holding Meta accountable.

"This is not a one-time effort, but part of a broader push to ensure Meta takes meaningful responsibility for the harmful content that appears on its platforms," Ari Hoffnung, managing director of JLens, told Business Insider. "Transparency is the necessary first step. Investors and the public need to understand what Meta is currently doing to combat hate on its platforms."

Both ADL and JLens say Meta's current disclosures fall short and that independent, community-specific metrics are essential to understanding the risks.

In addition to concerns about user safety, JLens also framed hate speech as a financial risk for Meta's shareholders. Hoffnung said harmful content on Meta could expose the company to legal, regulatory, and reputational risks and threaten relationships with advertisers.

"Meta is the platform where we've consistently identified as having one of the highest volumes of antisemitic and other hateful content, making it a priority for investor engagement," Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of ADL, told BI. "Meta also is a public company, and so as shareholders, we have a formal mechanism to push for transparency and accountability through resolutions like Proposal 8, which we believe is the most constructive way to drive lasting change from within the company."

The ADL, founded in 1913, is one of the most prominent civil rights organizations in the US focused on combating antisemitism and hate. In 2022, it acquired JLens, a Jewish values-based investor network, giving it a formal foothold in shareholder advocacy. JLens manages investments in major public companies, including Meta, through funds aligned with Jewish values and has stakes in most large public companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Meta.

While the ADL does not directly own Meta stock, its acquisition of JLens enables it to influence corporate governance through shareholder proposals.

"We've previously attempted to engage the company directly without success," Hoffnung said. "This year, we felt it was time to escalate our concerns through a shareholder proposal."

Shareholder proposals are a common tool during "proxy season," the period in spring when public companies hold annual meetings and shareholders vote on issues ranging from executive compensation to corporate social responsibility.

The pressure on Meta comes as the company's own Oversight Board, an independent group funded by Meta, recently raised alarms about the company's approach to hate speech enforcement. In a statement last week, the board criticized Meta's recent rollback of its moderation policies and warned that the changes could undermine user safety and brand trust.

Greenblatt said the ADL believes strongly in free expression but rejects the idea that it should come at the expense of user safety.

"We strongly believe in the importance of free expression, but it cannot come at the expense of safety," he said. "Antisemitic content and hate speech can lead to real-world harm, threats, and violence — as we've often seen — and it then crosses the line from protected expression into dangerous conduct."

Greenblatt pointed to Reddit's transparency report, which tracked incidents of Holocaust denial and other hate targeting specific groups, as a model for the kind of reporting they hope Meta will adopt if Proposal 8 is successful.

Proposal 8 is one of several measures investors will consider at Meta's annual meeting. Other shareholder proposals to be voted on include calls for greater transparency around child safety risks, oversight of Meta's use of artificial intelligence, and enhanced reporting on how the company's data collection practices affect user privacy.

JLens has been active beyond Meta this year. It has filed shareholder letters at Intel, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin, urging rejection of proposals it viewed as anti-Israel. During the 2024 proxy season, JLens and the ADL campaigned at dozens of companies to push for stronger action against antisemitism and other forms of hate.

Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at [email protected], Signal at +1408-905-9124, or WhatsApp at +1857-753-3949. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Meta laid off employees in Reality Labs amid restructuring efforts in hardware and VR.
• The layoffs affected Oculus Studios and Supernatural, Meta's VR gaming and fitness apps.
• Meta's Reality Labs faces a critical year as it aims to succeed in metaverse ambitions.

Meta laid off an undisclosed number of employees in Reality Labs, its hardware and virtual reality division, this week as part of a broader restructuring effort.

The cuts affect Oculus Studios, the company's in-house gaming division for Quest headsets, and the team behind Supernatural, the VR fitness app Meta acquired for over $400 million.

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the changes, saying that "some teams within Oculus Studios are undergoing shifts in structure and roles that have impacted team size." The spokesperson added that the company remains "committed to investing in mixed reality experiences, including fitness and games."

The Supernatural team confirmed in a Facebook post that the changes will mean fewer weekly workouts for the app's subscribers.

These layoffs follow a broader reduction earlier this year. In January, Meta announced it would eliminate nearly 4,000 roles as CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to "raise the bar on performance." Documents previously obtained by Business Insider showed that performance-based cuts affected at least 560 employees who worked in Meta's Reality Labs. Nearly half were on Meta's Horizon team.

In a memo obtained by BI earlier this year, Meta CTO and Reality Labs chief Andrew Bosworth called 2025 "the most critical" year in his eight-year tenure at Reality Labs.

"This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure," he wrote. Bosworth also said that Horizon Worlds on mobile must succeed for the company's long-term metaverse ambitions to survive.

In January, Meta reorganized its Reality Labs division. Meta's COO, Javier Olivan, now leads the team previously run by former Reality Labs COO Dan Reed. Other leaders in Reality Labs also now report to top executives in Meta's main business, showing that the company is making this division a bigger focus.

Although Meta is cutting staff, 495 roles remained open in Reality Labs, according to the company's careers site. A spokesperson told BI that affected employees are eligible for internal opportunities, and many have already been matched to open positions for interviews.

"If you choose not to look for another role at Meta or are unsuccessful in finding a new role, your termination date will be May 23, 2025," an internal email to one affected employee viewed by BI said.

The Verge earlier reported on these cuts.

Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1408-905-9124 or WhatsApp at +1857-753-3949. Contact Jyoti Mann via email at [email protected] or Signal at jyotimann.11. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• A legal case involving Meta revealed the company's secret experiments with training data.
• Meta used "ablation" to identify how specific data improved its Llama AI models.
• Some researchers say this could support a system to assign value to AI data and pay compensation.

A high-profile legal case has unearthed a trove of internal Meta communications, and one particular document has caught the eye of some AI researchers.

This reveals new insights into how models are built and could influence who gets to share in the spoils of this new technology.

Buried in these court filings is a description of how Meta researchers used a process called ablation to identify which data helped improve the company's Llama AI models.

Ablation is a medical technique that purposely destroys tissue to improve things like brain function. In AI, it involves removing parts of a system to study how those components contribute to performance.

In Meta's ablation experiments, the company replaced a portion of its AI training data with pirated books from a giant database called LibGen. Then, the company re-trained its Llama model to see the impact.

In one experiment, Meta added books about science and technology, along with fiction books, to the training data. In a second experiment, Meta only added fiction books.

In both experiments, Llama performance improved notably in industry benchmark evaluations, according to the internal Meta document disclosed in court filings. (Check out pages 18 and 19 here.)

This shows that Meta has the ability to assign value to specific training data, said Nick Vincent, assistant professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University.

Ablation is common, but also a secret

Ablation has become a common practice at the company and across the AI industry. For instance, one Meta engineer on LinkedIn mentions doing more than 100 ablations during the development of Llama 4 and previous iterations of the company's big AI models.

Meta doesn't publish the results of these experiments, and other AI companies keep this stuff private, too, Vincent said.

One potential reason: If tech giants tell the world which training data specifically helped their AI models, then the creators of this information would want to be paid — and they would have a handy estimate of how much money they're owed.

"Stating these numbers publicly would potentially give some content organizations firmer ground to stand on," Vincent said.

Making the results of ablation experiments public could also impact high-stakes copyright lawsuits that rage across the tech industry — with this specific Meta case (Kadrey v. Meta) being a good example.

In these cases, tech giants and AI startups argue that it's not copyright infringement for machines to "learn" from published material online.

Internal documents assigning value to specific content may not help with this.

"It's possible that publishing these value estimations would undermine the stances that Big Tech companies will take in these copyright lawsuits and court cases," Vincent said.

A Meta spokesperson said the company disagrees with the plaintiff's arguments in this legal case and added that its Llama models are helping individuals and companies be more innovative, productive, and creative.

"We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves and to protect the development of GenAI for the benefit of all," the spokesperson said.

Training data sources are now hidden

Keeping ablation experiments secret follows a broader trend away from sharing how data contributes to the creation and performance of AI models. 

In 2017, the Google research paper that kicked off the generative AI boom disclosed granular information on the training data used. It included about 40,000 sentences from The Wall Street Journal, for instance. Years ago, OpenAI, in its GPT-2 paper, described scraping web pages using millions of outbound links from Reddit. 

Fast forward to today, and companies share very little. When Meta released Llama 4 in early April, the company published a model card describing how it built the product. It didn't mention ablation at all, and it only discussed the training data generically as "a mix of publicly available, licensed data and information from Meta's products and services."

Again, the likely reason for this is that telling everyone what data you used might mean having to pay the creators of this information.

"It's really disappointing that they're not being open about it, and they're not giving credit to the material," said Bill Gross, CEO of ProRata, a startup that's trying to compensate creators for their contributions to AI.

Gross said content creators should be paid twice: once for having their data used to train AI models and again when AI models rely on this content to answer user questions.

Meta's secret ablation results

Meta's ablation experiments focus on this first training step, which uses mountains of data to help models understand the world. For example: To teach a machine to recognize a llama, you must show it as many photos of llamas and alpacas as possible so it can distinguish between the two animals.

Meta's first ablation experiment found that adding science, technology, and fiction books to the training data improved Llama's performance by 4.5% on an industry benchmark called BooIQ. Just adding the fiction books resulted in a 6% improvement.

The performance gains from these ablation experiments were as high as 5.5% on another benchmark known as SIQA, the Meta internal document said.

Peter Henderson, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton, tweeted out some Meta charts from the court document showing these gains.

While performance gains of about 5% seem small, in the AI race, any advantage is important.

"That's actually a lot because it's so hard to get every extra point on AI benchmarks," Gross said.

Can elves mate with humans?

Llama's improvement on the BooIQ benchmark shows the power of specific training data and how much AI models and tech companies rely on this information, Vincent said.

BoolQ is a series of 15,942 yes/no questions that AI models must answer. The more questions they get right, the higher the performance. A 5% improvement is the equivalent of answering almost 800 extra questions correctly.

One question on the BooIQ test asked, "Can elves and humans mate in 'Lord of the Rings?'"

You can only really know the answer to this for sure if you've read J.R.R. Tolkien's books — or rather if these books are in the training data, Vincent said. (Elves and humans can have babies in the LOTR universe, by the way.)

Vincent hopes revelations like this about Meta's secret ablation experiments will help create a new system that assigns credit to sources of training data and provides appropriate compensation. 

"AI chatbot products rely on the fact that some human somewhere did something useful, wrote it down, and published it," he said. "This technology repackages this stuff into something that is hopefully more useful."

"Ultimately, it's all humans at the top of this. Without this data, AI models will not be so good," he added. "Evidence of ablation like this could end up serving the mission of setting up a healthy data flow. It's important to sustain the institutions where people are incentivized to create content and knowledge and share it."

• The FTC took Meta to trial, arguing it's a monopoly and should sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.
• Meta says the true "market" where it operates is bigger and more competitive than what the FTC says.
• Antitrust law experts say the FTC has a tough battle but a real shot at winning.

The Federal Trade Commission's blockbuster trial against Meta kicked off in court this week, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg taking the stand as the first witness.

Government lawyers are trying to persuade a federal judge to force Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. They argue that, along with Facebook, the acquisitions of those apps were part of an illegal scheme that allows Meta to illegally dominate the "personal social networking services" market and help the company act as an illegal monopoly.

In court, Meta argues that the true market where it operates is much bigger than what the FTC claims. Far from being an illegal monopoly, Meta fiercely competes with TikTok and YouTube, Zuckerberg says, and its apps have evolved along with user habits. Besides, it says, its products are free.

Here's what some of the smartest people in antitrust law are saying:

William Kovacic, former FTC chair

The judge in the case has built a steep hill for the FTC to climb if it wants to win, Kovacic, who served as an FTC commissioner in the George W. Bush administration, said.

In a previous ruling, US District Judge James Boasberg was skeptical about the FTC's argument that TikTok, YouTube, or X shouldn't be considered part of the same market as Meta's products, according to Kovacic. The trial decision would come down to the evidence from Meta's internal records, Kovacic said.

"He said that the FTC, in some ways, was pushing existing law to its limits, and that he'd be looking very closely at what Meta had to say about the dimensions of the market, its position in that market, and about its justifications for the acquisitions," said Kovacic, who now teaches antitrust law at George Washington University's law school and has advised over a dozen countries on consumer protection law. "So I read in that earlier opinion some skepticism about the FTC's case."

Rebecca Allensworth, antitrust law professor

The case is basically "a toss-up," said Rebecca Allensworth, a Vanderbilt University law school professor who teaches an antitrust law class focused on Big Tech. She believes the case "is going to be won or lost" on the definition of the market where Meta competes. But it's clear, she says, that Meta meets the definition of a "monopoly power."

"The monopoly power question really ought to be answered according to whether or not Meta's customers feel locked in, and whether they really feel like they can give up Facebook or if they will just put up with the equivalent of higher prices — addicting products on Facebook, lots of ads, all the sort of bad things," Allensworth said. "And I think we have plenty of evidence of that. We would call that direct evidence of monopoly power."

Allensworth believes that the judge may balk at the FTC's proposed remedy of forcing Meta to divest from WhatsApp and Instagram, and might give the company a pass.

"Because that's such an obvious remedy, it might implicate the merits case that comes before," Allensworth said. "Because if a judge is not prepared to do that, a judge might not want to find liability."

Peter Cohan, management practice professor

"Meta will end up settling the case," says Peter Cohan, an associate professor of management practice at Babson College. He believes the FTC's argument — that Meta's acquisitions stifled competition by eliminating potential rivals — is more convincing than Meta's defense.

While the company claims it faces stiff competition and doesn't charge users, Cohan says its dominant hold on digital advertising is the real issue.

Despite pointing to TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat as major challengers, Meta's market power in ad spending paints a different picture. By some estimates, Cohan says, Meta is projected to have a significant market share in social media, with Facebook and Instagram combined accounting for 36.3% and 27.5% of ad spend respectively. YouTube is also a major player, with 15.5% of ad spend. TikTok, while growing rapidly, has a smaller share, at 9.5%,

If the FTC wins, Meta will likely appeal, Cohan says, but he doesn't rule out a negotiated outcome. "It might settle by spinning off Instagram," he says. A loss could also have ripple effects across the tech industry: "Google could also be more likely to lose and reach a divestiture settlement."

Lina Khan, former FTC chair

The Biden-era FTC chair, who shepherded the lawsuit after the agency sued Meta in the waning days of the first Trump administration, told CNN that the FTC can prove the company is a monopoly because it makes its products worse.

"Facebook has been significantly increasing the number of ads that it pushes to users, even though that makes the service worse," Khan said. "And that has not led it to suffer consequences in the marketplace — which itself is a marker of its monopoly power."

Barry Barnett, commercial litigator

The Susman Godfrey partner, who's represented Yale University, Alaska Airlines, and Neiman Marcus, thinks the FTC could win if it persuades the judge that the "personal social networking" market still exists today, not just when Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago.

"Meta seems to concede it still has a monopoly position in personal social networking," Barnett wrote in an email. "Therefore, if Judge Boasberg accepts the FTC's definition of the relevant market — despite the rise of TikTok, YouTube, and iMessage — the FTC will win the crucial point. Only the question of remedy will remain."

"I like the FTC's chances," he continued. "The bells and whistles of TikTok, etc., strike me as critical for a minority of social media mavens but at best optional for most."

Jennifer Huddleston, technology policy expert

"This case makes a lot of presumptions about how the businesses of Instagram and WhatsApp would have evolved," said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute.

She said that predicting how social media would have developed without Meta's acquisitions is inherently difficult and that both deals were approved by regulators at the time.

Huddleston also questioned the government's narrow definition of the market. In her view, Meta faces real competition.

"Gen Z is choosing different platforms and video forward options," she said, adding that apps like Signal and traditional SMS also compete with WhatsApp in the messaging space.

If Meta loses, Huddleston said users could feel the impact. A breakup could limit the ability to cross-post content between apps, while smaller companies might struggle to maintain services or invest in safety tools. It could also "send a chilling effect on mergers and acquisitions in the tech industry more generally," with consequences for both companies and consumers, she said.

Kellie Lerner, antitrust lawyer

The founding partner of Shinder Cantor Lerner, who's litigated numerous antitrust cases, thinks the passage of time has made the FTC's case more difficult to win.

"The FTC is off to a strong start, with excellent evidence revealing Meta's concerns about maintaining its market position with nascent competition from Instagram and WhatsApp," she said. "An ultimate win, however, will be challenging given the decade that has passed since those acquisitions. In my view, with a trial expected to last into July, it is really too close to call in these early days of testimony."

Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard University dropout

"Building a new app is hard," the Meta founder and CEO said on the witness stand.

Zuckerberg, explaining why his company purchased Instagram, said that Meta had developed numerous homegrown apps over the years that had died on the vine. It was easier, he said, to simply purchase Instagram.

"I'm sure we could have built an app," he added. "Whether it succeeded or not is a matter of speculation."

Correction: April 16, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated where Peter Cohan teaches. He is an associate professor of management practice at Babson College, not Georgetown University.

• The FTC's antitrust battle with Meta kicked off on Monday.
• Meta's opening statements revealed a decline in time spent consuming content from friends.
• Meta says that just 7% of time spent on Instagram in 2025 is spent viewing content from friends.

You're not imagining it, you're definitely seeing less of your friends' content on Facebook and Instagram.

The decline in friend-focused content is playing a central role in a landmark antitrust trial between Meta and the Federal Trade Commission currently underway in Washington, D.C.

The FTC has accused Meta of monopolizing the personal social networking market by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to neutralize future threats. The trial could lead to a court-ordered company breakup or mark a major defeat for the FTC's aggressive approach to Big Tech.

Meta, for its part, argued that its platforms face fierce competition from apps like TikTok and YouTube, and that consumer behavior — not anti-competitive conduct — is behind the way people use Facebook and Instagram today.

Part of Meta's testimony on Monday centered on the fact that people just aren't "broadcasting" content to their friends on Facebook and Instagram as much as they used to.

"The friend part has gone down quite a bit," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during Monday's trial, adding that Facebook particularly has "turned into more of a broad discovery and entertainment space."

In one slide of Meta's opening statement presentation, the company says that the "time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" has declined. In 2023, the time spent viewing friends' content was 22% on Facebook and 11% on Instagram. By 2025, that timeshare has dropped to 17% and 7%, respectively.

That's due in part to Meta's prioritization of short-form video and changes in how it recommends content to users.

In recent months, Meta has made a public show of trying to reverse the trend of users seeing fewer friend posts. In March, the company launched a new "friends" tab on Facebook that shows only posts, stories, and reels from people a user actually knows — no recommended content or algorithmic distractions. Zuckerberg has said it's part of a broader effort to bring back "OG Facebook," a more intimate version of the platform that returns to its roots and focuses on personal connections.

"I think we're going to build some awesome things that shape the future of human connection," he said on the company's last earnings call in January, and later described it on a podcast as "phase one of bringing back OG Facebook."

Instagram, meanwhile, has continued to expand friends-focused features like "Close Friends," and its top exec, Adam Mosseri, said earlier this year that it would double down on direct messaging in 2025.

In another slide of Meta's opening statement, the company says that people are going to DMs to share things with their friends. One slide includes a quote from Mosseri: "I think [Instagram]'s more of a messaging app than a broadcast-sharing app at this point."

"The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality," a spokesperson for Meta told Business Insider in a statement. "The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others."

Here are four interesting slides from Meta's opening statement:

Meta breaks down how time spent viewing content from users' friends has declined

"Broadcast 'Friends' Sharing Decline Has Continued," the slide says. Meta says the percentage of time spent viewing friends' content in 2023 was 22% on Facebook and 11% on Instagram.

Meta says that the decline has continued.

The slide says that the percentage of time spent viewing friends' content in 2025 declined to 17% on Facebook and 7% on Instagram.

Meta breaks down how the TikTok ban impacted hourly time spent on Instagram

Instagram usage increased "dramatically," the slide says.

'People have gone to Messaging for Friend Sharing'

The slide includes a screenshot of an email sent by Adam Mosseri in 2018 about messaging.

"Most personal sharing will be in messaging. There are 63x as many messages sent a day as posts on Facebook, and 10x as many messages as comments," the slide says.

"I think [Instagram]'s more of a messaging app than a broadcast-sharing app at this point," the slide says.

• Nonprofit Fairplay filed an FTC complaint against Meta over its Horizon Worlds platform.
• In the complaint, a Meta whistleblower alleged execs knew underage children were on the virtual platform.
• Fairplay researchers said they found minors on the platform and alleged Meta violated a children's privacy law.

A former Meta employee has accused the company of knowingly allowing children onto its virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, despite safety risks and potential violations of federal law.

Kelly Stonelake, who worked for the company for nearly 15 years and led product marketing for Horizon Worlds until early 2024, submitted a sworn statement as part of a complaint filed Thursday with the Federal Trade Commission. Fairplay, a nonprofit focused on children's media and marketing, lodged the complaint.

Stonelake, who said she was laid off by Meta in January 2024 after being on medical leave for about a year, filed a lawsuit against her former employer in February for sexual harassment, sexual discrimination, and retaliation. Meta then filed a motion to dismiss last month.

Fairplay alleges that Meta violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by permitting children under 13 to access Horizon Worlds using adult accounts — a loophole it said would enable the company to collect personal data from minors without parental consent. The nonprofit is calling for the FTC to investigate Meta.

"We're committed to providing safe, age-appropriate experiences on our platform," Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels told Business Insider. "Parents are required to manage accounts for pre-teens 10-12 on Quest, and grant permission for them to access Horizon Worlds."

He added, "We offer reporting tools so anyone can report suspected underage accounts to us, and if we become aware of a pre-teen using an account meant for someone 13 or older, we'll take steps to ensure they're in the right experience. This includes requiring proof of age, switching to a parent-managed account, or deleting the account altogether."

In a press release accompanying the FTC complaint, Stonelake said Meta had "extensive knowledge" that minors were accessing Horizon Worlds by logging into accounts registered for adults.

"Throughout my experience, the emphasis at Horizon was consistently on user growth, with safety considerations managed by leadership like liabilities to be minimized," Stonelake said in her statement.

She added, "Horizon Worlds was initially presented as a platform fostering inclusion and belonging, exemplified by hero scenarios like providing a safe space for marginalized individuals. In reality, it became a breeding ground for unchecked racism, sexual harassment, bullying, and child endangerment."

Stonelake provided several examples of Meta executives having knowledge of underage users on the platform. Stonelake said an employee posted on Meta's internal forum, Workplace, in 2022 about his experience on Horizon Worlds. According to the statement, the employee said young users directed racial slurs at him and noted that children under the age of 13 were present in the virtual spaces. Stonelake claims some Meta executives discussed the post.

She also claims that some executives were testing Horizon Worlds in 2022 but struggled to communicate because "very young" children's voices were "screaming at us from behind adult accounts."

Stonelake also alleges that there was a "general directive to avoid documenting discussions related to the presence of teens and children (users under 13) on the platform" due to potential legal ramifications. Stonelake said that raising concerns internally later led to exclusion from decision-making spaces.

Fairplay's investigation

Fairplay said its nine-month investigation into Horizon Worlds found that children under 13 regularly accessed the platform using standard adult accounts, enabling Meta to collect sensitive data from them — possibly in violation of federal law. The nonprofit's researchers documented the presence of children in nearly every virtual experience they visited, analyzed reviews from Meta's app store, and said they observed Meta's employees — called "community guides" — engaging with underage users in Horizon Worlds without intervening.

From July 2024 to March 2025, Fairplay said its researchers used Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3 headsets to explore some of the most popular games and spaces in Horizon Worlds. In total, they said they visited 12 different experiences at least twice each. During those 26 visits, the researchers said they encountered 512 users, 170 of whom (about 33%) they identified as clearly under 13 based on their voices and behavior.

Fairplay said it took steps to ensure accuracy by having multiple researchers independently review recordings and only counting users they could definitively identify as children. Because many users don't speak in voice chat, Fairplay said its figures represent the minimum number of children present.

Fairplay said it found children were using standard adult accounts, which lack parental consent requirements and COPPA-compliant safeguards, in 24 out of the 26 visits. Fairplay said it found at least one child under the age of 13 in 10 out of 12 games and experiences visited in the investigation. In certain games, they said the presence of underage users was overwhelming: at least 52% of users in the space "VR Classroom" were identified as children, and in one session, 20 out of 27 participants had "obvious child voices."

Although Meta introduced supervised child accounts in November 2024, Fairplay said that children continued to use adult accounts to circumvent safety restrictions, which could be done by entering a false birthdate. After the policy change, Fairplay said it returned to Horizon Worlds in February 2025 and found that 42% of users in four popular experiences were still children.

Fairplay's investigation also raised concerns about Meta's awareness of the issue. During visits to "Horizon Central," researchers said they encountered Meta's community guides who interacted directly with children using standard accounts and, in some cases, acknowledged their age.

Despite having the authority to remove users or alert safety specialists, Fairplay said the community guides it observed did not remove any children or appear to escalate the issue.

In addition to its in-world research, Fairplay reviewed all 626 verified user reviews of Horizon Worlds published in Meta's app store between July and December 2024. Nearly one in five of those explicitly mentioned the presence of children, Fairplay said, with some describing the platform as a "daycare" or a "nursery."

Mounting metaverse pressure

Meta's expansion of Horizon Worlds to include younger users came at a moment of mounting pressure for the company's metaverse ambitions to show results.

In a November internal memo viewed by BI, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, called 2025 the "most critical" year yet to prove the metaverse was either a visionary feat or a "legendary misadventure."

Meta needed "to drive sales, retention, and engagement across the board but especially in MR," he wrote, referring to mixed reality. "And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance."

Internal metrics previously reported by The Wall Street Journal showed that Horizon's monthly active users dropped from 300,000 in early 2022 to around 200,000 later that year. Meta subsequently began lowering the age threshold, first opening Horizon Worlds to teens aged 13 and up in 2023, then adding supervised child accounts for users as young as 10 in late 2024.

Samantha Ryan, Meta's VP of metaverse content, echoed this shift in a February blog post. "We're seeing growth of young users in Horizon Worlds," she wrote, adding that it "signals a growing opportunity for new business models," including free-to-play experiences with in-game purchases.

Have a tip? Contact Jyoti Mann via email at [email protected] or Signal at jyotimann.11. Contact Pranav Dixit on Signal at +1-408-905-9124 or email him at [email protected]. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• According to a draft of her opening statement, Sarah Wynn-Williams plans to testify about how Meta cooperated with China.
• "Sarah Wynn-Williams' testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims," Meta said.
• Read the full draft testimony obtained by Business Insider below.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former head of global public policy, plans to testify to Congress on Wednesday, detailing allegations that Meta executives helped China advance its AI capabilities and undermine US national security.

Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook between 2011 and 2017, filed a whistleblower complaint in March with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company, now Meta, said she was fired eight years ago for poor performance.

She also published a memoir that month, "Careless People," where she made allegations about Meta's company culture and China operations. A spokesperson previously told Business Insider that the "false and defamatory book should never have been published."

At the heels of the book's release, Meta won an emergency arbitration decision that temporarily stopped Wynn-Williams and her publisher from promoting the memoir or making disparaging statements against her former employer.

The ruling did not stop the book from becoming a No. 1 bestseller.

"This gag order was sought by a company whose CEO claims to be a champion of free speech," Wynn-Williams' draft testimony says. "The American people deserve to know the truth."

"Sarah Wynn-Williams' testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims," a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email to BI. "While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today."

Representatives for Wynn-Williams declined to comment.

A draft of Wynn-Williams' opening statement, which Business Insider obtained, includes allegations that Meta established a clandestine relationship with China, providing user data to the Chinese Communist Party and establishing a "physical pipeline" between the US and China.

During President Donald Trump's first term, the administration killed a project from Google and Facebook that would have established an 8,000-mile-long broadband cable between the US and Hong Kong.

Below is Wynn-Williams' draft opening statement she plans to give before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee:

Chairman Hawley, Ranking Member Durbin and distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

My name is Sarah Wynn-Williams, and I served as Director of Global Public Policy at Facebook, now Meta, for nearly seven years starting in 2011. Throughout those seven years, I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an $18 billion dollar business in China.

We are engaged in a high-stakes AI arms race against China. And during my time at Meta, company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress, and the American public. I sit before this Committee today to set the record straight about these illegal and dangerous activities.

Meta's dishonesty started with a betrayal of core American values. Mark Zuckerberg pledged himself a free speech champion. Yet I witnessed Meta work "hand in glove" with the Chinese Communist Party to construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored their critics. When Beijing demanded that Facebook delete the account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil, they did it. And then lied to Congress when asked about the incident in a Senate hearing.

The willingness to censor was not the only troubling thing I witnessed. I watched as executives decided to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to Meta user data — including that of Americans.

Meta does not dispute these facts. They can't. I have the documents. As recently as this Monday they claimed they do not operate services in China. Another lie.

In fact, they began offering products and services in China as early as 2014. That hasn't stopped. Their own SEC filings from last year show that China is now Meta's second biggest market. Meanwhile, Meta's AI model — Llama — has contributed significantly to Chinese advances in AI technologies like DeepSeek.

Facebook's secret mission to get into China was called "Project Aldrin" and was restricted to need-to-know staff. There was no bridge too far. Meta built a physical pipeline connecting the United States and China. Meta executives ignored warnings that this would provide backdoor access to the Chinese Communist Party, allowing them to intercept the personal data and private messages of American citizens. The only reason China does not currently have access to US user data through this pipeline is because Congress stepped in.

Meta started briefing the Chinese Communist Party as early as 2015. These briefings focused on critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. The explicit goal being to help China outcompete American companies. There's a straight line you can draw from these briefings to the recent revelations that China is developing AI models for military use, relying on Meta's Llama model. Meta's internal documents describe their sales pitch for why China should allow them in the market by quote "help[ing] China increase global influence and promote the China Dream."

The truth about what has gone on in China matters. I filed a shareholder resolution asking Meta's Board to investigate its activity in China. And I filed whistleblower complaints with the SEC and the DOJ.

The measure of how important these truths are is directly proportional to the ferocity of Meta's efforts to censor and intimidate me. I relied on their commitment given in 2018 that they would waive their rights to pursue forced arbitration. Despite that public commitment, they brought a case against me for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now they have a legal gag order that silences me even as Meta and their proxies spread lies about me. This order is so expansive that it prohibits me from speaking with Members of Congress. This gag order was sought by a company whose CEO claims to be a champion of free speech.

The American people deserve to know the truth. Meta has been willing to compromise its values, sacrifice the security of its users, and undermine American interests to build its China business. It's been happening for years, covered up by lies, and continues to this day. I am here at considerable personal risk because you have the power and the authority to hold them accountable.

Thank you for your time and attention to this critical matter.

• Sarah Wynn-Williams' lawyer says Meta has blocked her from speaking to Congress on China dealings.
• The block follows an arbitration ruling enforcing a non-disparagement clause in her severance.
• But Sen. Josh Hawley said on X that Wynn-Williams will appear before his subcommittee next week.

Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams' lawyer says Meta has blocked her from communicating with members of Congress who are investigating the company's dealings with the Chinese Communist Party.

But Sen. Josh Hawley announced on social media Wednesday that Wynn-Williams will testify, under oath and in public, before a subcommittee next week. Hawley could not be reached for further comment, and Wynn-Williams did not immediately respond to requests after his post on X.

The question of whether Wynn-Williams will appear comes after a bipartisan Senate investigation cited her memoir, "Careless People," as the catalyst for a probe into Meta's dealings in China.

Before Hawley's post, Ravi Naik, the legal counsel for Wynn-Williams, told Business Insider that his client is barred from speaking to lawmakers as a fallout of an emergency arbitration ruling Meta obtained last month. The ruling enforces a non-disparagement clause in Wynn-Williams' severance agreement and bars her from promoting the book.

"Congress has made it clear they expect to be able to communicate with Ms. Wynn-Williams, and my client wishes to do so," Naik said in a statement. "Meta has, however, silenced Ms. Wynn-Williams through an arbitration process, which means that she is prohibited from communicating with Congress. Ms. Wynn-Williams believes that people deserve to know the truth."

According to the arbitration ruling, Wynn-Williams' severance agreement with Meta doesn't bar her from speaking to lawmakers. But when she sought to remove Meta's gag order, the arbitrator made it explicit that she wasn't allowed to.

"If Respondent were permitted to communicate with legislators…such actions would only create an exception that would eat the rule," the arbitrator said in an excerpt of the statement provided to BI by Wynn-Williams' spokesperson. "In such a circumstance, nothing would limit or prevent those legislators (or their aides) from parroting to the public any disparaging statements that Respondent is otherwise barred from disclosing to anyone other than a governmental investigatory body. Those legislators could also use their respective platforms as public officials to explicitly assist Respondent [to] promote her book, which she is barred from doing."

"This ruling," Wynn-Williams' spokesperson said "implies that the gag order on Ms. Wynn-Williams takes precedence over elected officials' right to know information pertaining to national security."

A Meta spokesperson told BI that the company was "not intending to stand in the way of her exercising her rights."

They added that the company did not operate its services in China. "It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook's effort to connect the world," they said. "This was widely reported beginning a decade ago. We ultimately opted not to go through with the ideas we'd explored, which Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019."

The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and joined by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Republican Hawley, opened the probe into Meta's dealings with China on April 1.

The committee's letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday outlines a sweeping request for records dating back to 2014. Lawmakers are seeking all Meta communications with Chinese government officials, including the Cyberspace Administration of China, and records on Meta's subsidiaries and partners in the country, among other details.

They also want information about whether Llama, Meta's AI model, was used by the People's Liberation Army or Chinese tech firms. The request also includes all documents related to "Project Aldrin," which Wynn-Williams' book claims, was Meta's three-year plan to break into China, as well as any internal deliberations about censoring content at the request of national governments.

Meta has dismissed Wynn-Williams' allegations as false and characterized her as a disgruntled former employee. A spokesperson previously told BI that her claims were "a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives."

Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017, has filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC. Neither the arbitrator's ruling nor Meta's arguments in arbitration dispute the factual content of her memoir, her spokesperson says.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Meta's AI research head, Joelle Pineau, is departing as the company makes major AI investments.
• Pineau's exit may complicate Meta's ability to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.
• Meta aims to make Llama the industry standard and reach a billion chatbot users.

Meta's head of artificial intelligence research, Joelle Pineau, is leaving the company at a time when the tech giant is pouring billions into AI development to keep pace with industry rivals.

Pineau, who joined Facebook in 2017 and served as the vice president of AI research and the leader of Meta's Fundamental AI Research group, announced her departure on LinkedIn on Tuesday.

"Today, as the world undergoes significant change, as the race for AI accelerates, and as Meta prepares for its next chapter, it is time to create space for others to pursue the work," she wrote. "I will be cheering from the sidelines, knowing that you have all the ingredients needed to build the best AI systems in the world." Her last day will be May 30.

"We thank Joelle for her leadership of FAIR," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. "She's been an important voice for Open Source and helped push breakthroughs to advance our products and the science behind them." They did not answer a question about whether Meta had already started looking for a successor.

Pineau led a team of about 1,000 people across 10 locations at Meta. She wrote on LinkedIn that she would take time "to observe and reflect." She will continue to teach computer science at McGill University in Montreal.

Pineau's departure could complicate Meta's efforts to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk's xAI. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has prioritized AI at Meta, committing as much as $65 billion to AI-related projects this year.

Llama, Meta's open-source large language model that competes with proprietary models from other companies, has been a key initiative for the company. Zuckerberg aims to make Llama the industry standard worldwide and believes Meta's AI chatbot, available across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, could reach a billion users this year. As of December, 600 million users accessed Meta AI each month.

Last year, the company reorganized its AI teams to place Pineau and FAIR closer to the product division to accelerate the implementation of research into Meta's various products.

Pineau's work in AI dates back more than two decades. As a student at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, she worked on a voice recognition system for helicopter pilots, she told the Financial Times in an interview. She said she joined Meta because "it was pretty obvious that a lot of the biggest innovation in AI was going to happen in industry" and added that she didn't interview anywhere else because "Meta was the only [company] that had a commitment to open science and open research."

Pineau's departure comes amid other leadership changes at Meta. The company recently lost two other senior executives: Dan Neary, the vice president for the Asia-Pacific region, Meta's largest market; and Kate Hamill, the managing director for retail and e-commerce in North America, who'd worked at the company for more than a decade.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• OpenAI's new 4o tool generates Ghibli-style images on request, via the paid version of ChatGPT.
• The free version of ChatGPT, which uses OpenAI's older DALL-E 3 tool, refuses to create such images.
• The free ChatGPT said it can't do this because Ghibli "is a copyrighted animation studio, and its artistic style is protected."

When AI-generated Ghibli-style images started popping up on social media this week, I contacted OpenAI.

The startup had just launched a new image-generation tool called 4o, a powerful upgrade from its DALL-E 3 service. Users started asking ChatGPT for images in the style of the famed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. And the new 4o obliged.

I tried it myself, using the free version of ChatGPT, and got a much different response: "I wasn't able to generate the image in the style of Studio Ghibli due to content policy restrictions," OpenAI's chatbot told me.

Why was OpenAI letting 4o users do this, while refusing my similar requests on the basis on "content policy"? I asked an OpenAI spokesperson. She responded on Wednesday with this explanation, which cited an update to OpenAI's system card, the document that lays out the details of new models and tools like 4o.

"We added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist," the company said in this document. The OpenAI spokesperson added that the company continued to prevent "generations in the style of individual living artists" but did permit "broader studio styles."

Hayao Miyazaki, the artist who cofounded Studio Ghibli, is still alive. So using 4o to generative images in his style would seem to be not allowed. However, this is a big studio, so maybe these images fall under the "broader studio" policy that the OpenAI spokesperson described.

Either way, it's clear that OpenAI has made a major change in its approach to copyright and image generation lately.

On Thursday, my colleague Pranav Dixit and I tested this out to show how OpenAI's technology treats similar requests differently, depending on which image-generation tool you use.

Pranav used the paid ChatGPT service, which comes with the new 4o tool. He asked for images in the style of Studio Ghibli. The chatbot created several, including the one at the top of this story. It shows an older artist being angry at a younger tech executive who looks a bit like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Weird coincidence!

Pranav then went down the technology rabbit hole, which he enjoys doing. (Good trait for a tech reporter). He got 4o to churn about several more images in the Ghibli style, like this one.

I tried similar Ghibli-style requests on Thursday using the free ChatGPT service, which comes with OpenAI's older DALL-E 3 image-generation tool.

The tool refused my requests, citing copyright rules. Here's what ChatGPT told me:

"I can't generate images in the style of Studio Ghibli because it is a copyrighted animation studio, and its artistic style is protected."

You can't be clearer than that. OpenAI won't do this because it would infringe Studio Ghibli's copyright.

And yet, another OpenAI tool is quite happy to generate these types of images. So what gives?

I asked OpenAI's spokesperson if this is a double standard. Or has the company changed its approach to copyright recently? Or maybe it has struck a content deal with Studio Ghibli?

OpenAI didn't respond to these questions on Thursday afternoon. Studio Ghibli, which is based in Tokyo, Japan, also didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider late on Wednesday, US time.

If we get any more answers on this confusing situation, we'll write another story on this. 

Either way, this is probably a great way to get users to upgrade to the paid version of OpenAI's ChatGPT service. I'm still grumpy that Pranav can generate better images than me. Here's the one I managed to get out of the free version. 

• Two senior Meta executives, Dan Neary and Kate Hamill, are leaving the company.
• Neary led Meta's Asia-Pacific growth; Hamill strengthened US advertising.
• Hamill will join Pinterest, while Neary plans a break before exploring new steps.

Two senior Meta executives — Dan Neary, vice president for Asia-Pacific, and Kate Hamill, managing director for retail and e-commerce in North America — are leaving the company after more than a decade each in key leadership roles. The departures are unrelated.

Neary, who joined Meta in 2013, announced his decision to step down in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. He described the move as the end of a "12-year run," during which he helped grow the company's business across the Asia-Pacific region.

Based in Singapore, he oversaw Meta's expansion in some of its largest and fastest-growing international markets, including Australia, Southeast Asia, and Greater China.

"It's hugely gratifying for me to look back at the small Singapore office where this journey started over a decade ago and see how far we have come together," Neary wrote. "It's been the ride of a lifetime on the Meta APAC rocket ship."

He added that he would remain for a few months to help with the leadership transition before taking a break to spend time with family and explore the next steps.

Neary's exit marks the end of an era for Meta's Asia-Pacific operations, which have seen explosive growth over the past decade. Asia is now Meta's largest user base, home to over a billion accounts across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Meta's platforms have become essential for communication, commerce, and digital advertising in India, Indonesia, and Thailand. The region also continues to be a key driver of Meta's business messaging and performance ad revenue.

Hamill, who spent 13 years at Meta, will join Pinterest as vice president of enterprise sales for North America starting April 7. She will oversee revenue and sales teams in the US and Canada and work closely with Pinterest's Chief Revenue Officer, Bill Watkins.

Hamill led Meta's advertising relationships across major verticals, including retail, travel, entertainment, and gaming. She also worked closely with product teams on offerings like mobile app ads.

In a LinkedIn post earlier this week, she said she was drawn to Pinterest's focus on "AI-driven and lower funnel ad solutions " and the company's mission to build a "more positive online space".

Her departure is notable given her role in strengthening Meta's ties with major US advertisers during a period of rapid growth in its ads business. She helped launch and scale tools like Advantage+, automatically optimizing ads to reach likely buyers using AI. Advertising remains Meta's primary source of revenue.

Neither executive gave a specific reason for their departure.

A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg, that Neary took the company's Asia Pacific business to "incredible heights, delivering consistently strong results over the years."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Workers across industries report being unknowingly blacklisted from their former employers, sometimes for years.
• Experts say block lists are legal but raise ethical concerns, as employees often have no way to appeal the decision.
• Block lists often operate without oversight, leaving employees with no way to challenge their status.

Earlier this month, Business Insider revealed that Meta maintains secret "block" lists preventing some former employees from being rehired. Since then, a flood of emails and messages to BI, as well as discussions across Reddit and LinkedIn suggests that this practice, while not illegal, is far more widespread than many job seekers realize.

Workers from across corporate America shared eerily similar stories of applying for roles at former employers, only to be mysteriously ghosted by recruiters or quietly marked as "ineligible for rehire." In many cases, the affected individuals claimed they had strong performance records and no history of workplace misconduct. All of them requested for their identities and the names of their workplaces to be kept anonymous to prevent retaliation from their former employers.

"A special kind of cruelty"

One former employee from the consulting industry who described their experience in an email to BI said that they found themselves on a block list after they quit because of workplace politics. This employee said that they found out they were on a list from the company's HR department after applying to multiple roles since they left. "To make matters worse, [I] confirmed that it's still happening even after eight years of leaving," they wrote, adding that they were exploring legal options.

A former employee of a major chip company who was part of a wave of layoffs in 2015 said they were told they were "banned for life" from working at the company despite a promotion and a raise right before the cut. "Why? No one seems to know," they said, "and it seems likely that I will never know."

Another former employee of the same chip company told BI that their manager put them on a list after they left due to disagreements. When managers, including ones this person had known for years, tried to rehire them over the years, they wouldn't be able to. "At one point, I checked with HR, and they confirmed to me that I was on a list," they said. "But told me that a manager could overturn the decision, but that never happened."

At some companies, human resources have designated alternate names for the "block" list. An engineer who worked for a large publicly traded internet company based in Silicon Valley from 2010 to 2014 told BI that these block lists existed at the company, too, but with a different categorization. "I got strong performance reviews for multiple consecutive performance cycles," they said. "But when I resigned, I was put on a 'non-regretted attrition' list."

Another former manager who worked at the same company from 2009 through 2016 in multiple countries said that a label called "non-regretted attrition" when an employee quit would essentially block them from being rehired. "The only people deciding which category someone who left fell into was HR and the direct manager," they said. "On the flip side, if you were 'regretted attrition,' you would be fast-tracked for interviews and at least guaranteed a recruiter screen."

Other emails and messages to Business Insider came from frustrated ex-workers from Meta. Three former Meta employees who were laid off along with thousands of other workers in 2022 told BI that multiple hiring managers who had tried to rehire them were told by HR that these former employees were on "do not hire" lists and could not be hired back. "All of those opportunities ended in mysterious dead ends," one of them wrote. "It felt like a special kind of cruelty."

One said previous managers at the company ran "into roadblocks" after having recruiters reach out to rehire them. "In my conversation with someone from HR, I was told there is a 'do not engage' flag against my name in their system despite having good performance ratings during my time at Meta," they told BI.

A Meta spokesperson previously told BI that the company had "clear criteria for when someone is marked ineligible for rehire that are applied to all departing employees, and there are checks and balances in the process so that a single manager cannot unilaterally tag someone ineligible without support."

The company also said that its decision to bar an ex-employee from rehire is based on a multitude of factors: "We determine, at the time of separation, the reason for the employee's departure — policy violation, performance termination, voluntary resignation etc. — and that, along with the last rating prior to separation and any other recent performance signals, determines whether an employee is eligible for rehire or not."

Block lists across all industries

A nurse with 38 years of experience claimed that even hospitals around the country keep block lists after unsuccessfully trying to get rehired at previous workplaces and hearing from HR that they weren't eligible "If a manager has a beef against an employee, they can easily keep them from being hired again," they said. "It is, more often than not, punitive, and there is nothing you can do about it."

On Reddit, dozens of people talked about how commonplace the practice seems to be. One user shared how their company's internal block list functioned: "If you leave for a competitor, you're automatically flagged as 'do not rehire.' There's no discussion, no appeal — just an invisible wall you don't even know exists until you try coming back."

"Companies do input whether you are eligible for rehire in their human capital management (HCM) system," career coach Marlo Lyons told BI. "If they put 'not eligible for rehire,' which many fired employees are, then you would not be rehired no matter how you've changed or grown and no matter if you applied to a different department. [It] does raise questions about how these decisions are made and whether employees have any recourse."

A "large-scale, systematic approach"

On LinkedIn, more than a hundred people weighed in on a post by Laszlo Bock, a former Google HR head, who was surprised by Meta's block lists that BI reported about. "I've never heard of anything like this," Bock wrote on the platform. "I've sometimes heard an exec say, 'Don't ever re-hire this person,' but never seen a large-scale, systematic approach like this."

Karen Liska, an attorney and Director of People Operations at SafeSend, wrote in a comment on Bock's post that some companies used such lists as "a risk mitigation strategy" but added that there could be issues with their implementation. "Like any other tool in a large org that is meant to help keep systems functioning, it can be used for protective purposes or other legitimate business reasons, or it can be used improperly as part of retaliation or to maintain discriminatory practices," Liska wrote. She questioned whether these lists should have expiration dates "to give people a chance to learn and grow or for the security/revenge risk to cool off."

Rehiring former employees can be a business risk, Liska told BI in an interview. They might need performance interventions, or resume past negative behaviours like poor attendance. "An 'ineligible for rehire' list helps protect against these risks by ensuring that regardless of turnover in HR or leadership, there is a source of knowledge within the business about which former employees may not be viable future candidates," she said.

If someone is fired or laid off, being ineligible for rehire should be communicated, Liska said. And companies should have a policy for re-evaluating the reasons someone is placed on a list to begin with to leave a potential opening in the future when there isn't a significant legal risk. "Perhaps a different manager, or a different line of work, or just gaining more experience could make all the difference and turn an underperforming or unhappy former employee into a productive and happy returning employee," she said.

Liska believes it's time to have an industry-wide conversation about this practice. "Simply saying 'don't have these lists at all' without a viable alternative ignores the difficulties of managing large companies at scale." she said.

For employees, the existence of block lists introduces yet another layer of uncertainty in an already ruthless job market. While companies argue that blocking certain employees is a matter of business strategy or risk management, critics say the practice disproportionately harms workers who may have left on neutral terms.

In today's hyper-competitive job market, the question isn't just whether you'll be welcomed back — it's whether the door was silently locked behind you the moment you walked out.

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert contributed reporting.

If you're a current or former Meta employee or have an insight to share about the company, contact Pranav Dixit from a nonwork device securely on Signal at +1-408-905-9124 or email him at [email protected].