Facebook: Meta's flagship platform is still growing

2/5/23 7:00PM

Maximum efficiency‍‍

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

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

‍Not dead yet

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

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

Jon Keegan4h

Report: Google is backstopping Anthropic’s $35 billion data center deal

Google and Anthropic have always had close ties. The search giant invested early in the maker of Claude, which boosted Google’s investment returns last quarter.

But the two companies appear to be closer than we knew. According to a new report from Bloomberg, it turns out that Google is backstopping $35 billion worth of data center leases for Anthropic.

Last fall, Anthropic announced that was getting into the data center business, pledging $50 billion in a partnership with Fluidstack.

The revelation adds to concerns of so-called “circular deals,” which could lead to a domino-like collapse if one company fails.

Google’s Backstops Underpin $35 Billion Chip Deal for Anthropic

Last fall, Anthropic announced that was getting into the data center business, pledging $50 billion in a partnership with Fluidstack.

The revelation adds to concerns of so-called “circular deals,” which could lead to a domino-like collapse if one company fails.

Jon Keegan

Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5, a locked-down, safer version of Mythos

Claude Fable 5 will cost twice as much as Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic’s current flagship model. The company also released Claude Mythos 5, but only for trusted partners for testing.

Rani Molla7h

Amazon shatters record in Canada’s “maple bond” market

Amazon has set a record in the Canadian corporate bond market by issuing CA$14 billion ($10.04 billion) of Canadian dollar-denominated notes, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The five-part deal officially eclipses the previous record of CA$8.5 billion established just last month by Alphabet.

This massive push comes as hyperscalers aggressively diversify funding to bankroll historic AI capital expenditure, a strategy mirrored by Alphabet’s parallel expansion into European debt markets to fuel its soaring infrastructure demands.

Man using smartphone, his head is replaced with a huge brain

Apple wants to finally give smartphones a brain

Releasing the iOS 27 developer beta is a start, but Siri can’t rescue us from app overload until it can run the third-party apps we actually use.

Rani Molla10h

Jon Keegan6/8/26

OpenAI files confidentially for IPO

Today OpenAI announced it has filed confidentially with the SEC to go public. The company said in a blog post that it filed the draft S-1 form.

OpenAI’s filing comes a week after archrival Anthropic — now valued at $965 billion — also filed a confidential S-1 for its own public offering. Both IPOs are expected to be among the largest in US history.

In a press release, OpenAI wrote:

“We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC