Meta may be just-short-of-criminally irresponsible, but at least they’re consistent. Having decided that news coverage isn’t important to their business, even though Meta is an important news source for many people, they’ve decided to remove their Facebook News section in the UK, Germany and France. They haven’t yet blocked links from news sites, as they did in Canada, but that seems certain to follow.
GX Bank Berhad (GXBank) announced that it is the first of the five digital bank licence applicants to obtain approval to commence operations in Malaysia. GXBank is a subsidiary of GXS Bank – the digital bank joint venture between Grab and Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel), as well as a consortium of Malaysian investors including Kuok Group.
Meanwhile, for your list of Things There’s No Reason for Meta to Do, you can add an “all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model” that aims to provide a universal speech and text translator across nearly 100 languages. They haven’t actually released the system, but have posted a one-sentence demo and technical resources for researchers. It’s not like Meta has better places to spend the money, such as improving content moderation or chasing down fake news.
Adobe has announced a new solution within its GenStudio suite, GenStudio for Performance Marketing. This self-service application is aimed at accelerating the creation of display and social ads, emails and banners using approved, on-brand content. The solution will leverage Adobe Firefly as well as third-party LLMs.