Meta and Oakley have combined forces to brings us a brand new set of the smart glasses, the Oakley Meta HSTN (pronounced HOW-stuhn), with significant camera and battery upgrades over previous Meta specs.
They’re being dubbed as ‘Performance AI glasses’, apparently built with athletes in mind. They’re equipped with the Meta AI voice assistance, allowing you to trigger actions with your voice – such as starting a recording via the built in camera.
First up, the Oakley Meta HSTN glasses pack in battery which can last a claimed eight hours of typical use and up to 19 hours on standby.
That’s significantly longer than the four hours of typical use touted by the Ray-Ban Meta, although in our review they lasted a whole day if recording sessions were kept to a minimum. Still, it’s a promising start for the Oakley smart specs.
Like the best wireless earbuds, the glasses come with a charging case which can provide an additional 40 hours of charge on the go, and you can replenish the battery from 0% to 50% in 22 minutes. An 80% charge will take 45 minutes.
Meta / OakleyMeta / OakleyMeta / Oakley
The 12MP camera in the top-right of the frame is capable of capturing 3K resolution, Ultra HD video, an improvement on the 1,440 x 1,920 recording of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
The ‘capture LED’ is in the opposite corner, which illuminates when the camera is recording or live streaming. This is so others around you know you’re recording video, and if this light is blocked in any way you won’t be able to record until it’s uncovered.
You also get built-in open-ear speakers, allowing you to listen to music and podcasts, and make and receive phone calls on the go, plus they’re IPX4 rated which means they should be able to withstand splashing and spraying water and sweat.
The Oakley Meta HSTN price is $399 and they’ll be initially available in 15 countries (including the US, Canada and UK) later this summer, with more countries (including India, Mexico and the UAE) being added later in the year. If you can’t wait that long, you’ll be able to pick up the limited edition Desert 24k Prizm Polar specs from July 11 for $499.
Anyone whose phone number is just one digit off from a popular restaurant or community resource has long borne the burden of either screening or redirecting misdials. But now, AI chatbots could exacerbate this inconvenience by accidentally giving out private numbers when users ask for businesses’ contact information.
Apparently, the AI helper that Meta created for WhatsApp may even be trained to tell white lies when users try to correct the dissemination of WhatsApp user numbers.
According to The Guardian, a record shop worker in the United Kingdom, Barry Smethurst, was attempting to ask WhatsApp’s AI helper for a contact number for TransPennine Express after his morning train never showed up.
In recent years, numerous plaintiffs—including publishers of books, newspapers, computer code, and photographs—have sued AI companies for training models using copyrighted material. A key question in all of these lawsuits has been how easily AI models produce verbatim excerpts from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content.
For example, in its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times stories. In its response, OpenAI described this as a “fringe behavior” and a “problem that researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere work hard to address.”
But is it actually a fringe behavior? And have leading AI companies addressed it? New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different companies—provides surprising insights into this question. Some of the findings should bolster plaintiffs’ arguments, while others may be more helpful to defendants.
At this point, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that discussing your deepest secrets and personal issues with an AI chatbot is not a good idea. And when that chatbot is made by Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram (including all its sordid history with user data privacy), there is even more reason to be cautious. But it seems a lot of users are oblivious to the risks, and in return, exposing themselves in the worst possible ways.
Your chatbot interactions with Meta AI — from seeking trip suggestions to jazzing up an image — are publicly visible in the app’s endlessly-scrolling vertical Discover feed. I installed the app a day ago, and in less than 10 minutes of using it, I had already come across people sharing their entire resume, complete with their address, phone number, qualifications, and more, on the main feed page.
A sample of private information appearing in the app’s Discover feed.Meta AI / Digital Trends
Some had asked the Meta AI chatbot to give them trip ideas in Bangkok involving strip clips, while others had weirdly specific demands regarding a certain skin condition. Users on social media have also documented the utterly chaotic nature of their app’s Discover feed. An expert at the Electronic Privacy Information Center told WIRED that people are sharing everything from medical history to court details.
How to plug Meta AI app’s privacy holes?
Of course, an app that doesn’t offer granular controls and a more explicit setup flow regarding chat privacy is a disaster waiting to happen. The Meta AI app clearly fumbled on this front and puts the onus of course correction on users. If you have the app installed on your phone, follow these steps on your phone.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Open the Meta app and tap on the round profile icon in the top-right corner of the app to open the Settings dashboard. On the Settings page, tap on Data & Privacy, followed by Manage your information on the next page.
You will now see an option that says “Make all public prompts visible to only you.” Tap on it and select “Apply to all” in the pop-up window, as shown in the image below. If you are concerned about previous AI chats that have contained sensitive information, you can clear the past log by tapping on the “Delete all prompts” option on the same page.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Next, go back to the Data & Privacy section and click on the “Suggesting your prompts on other apps” option. On the next page, disable the toggles corresponding to Instagram and Facebook.
If you have already shared your Meta interactions publicly, click on the notepad icon in the bottom tray to check the entire history. On the chat record page, tap on any of the past interactions to open it, and then tap on the three-dot menu button in the top-right corner.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Doing so opens a pop-up tray where you see options to either delete the chat or make it private so that no other users of the Meta AI app can see it in their Discover feed. As a general rule of thumb, don’t discuss personal or identifiable information with the chatbot, and also avoid sharing pictures to give them creative edits.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Why is it deeply problematic?
When the Meta AI app was introduced in April, the company said its Discover feed was “a place to share and explore how others are using AI.” Right now, it’s brimming with all kinds of weird requests. A healthy few of them appear to be fixated on finding free dating and fun activity ideas, some are about career and relationship woes, finding love in foreign lands, and skin issues in intimate parts of the body.
Facebook’s “Meta AI” literally just puts everyone’s private conversations directly on a public For You page
Here is the worst part. The only meaningful warning appears when you are about to post your AI creation (or interaction) to the feed section. The pop-up message says “Feed is public” at the top, and underneath that, you see the “post to feed” button. According to Business Insider, that warning was not always visible and was only added after the public outcry.
But it appears that a lot of people are not aware of what the “Post to Feed” button actually does. To them, it might come out as something referring to their own feed where the Meta AI chats are catalogued in an orderly fashion for their eyes, just the way you will see them in other chatbot apps such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
Another risk is the exposure. During the initial setup, when the app picks up account information from the Facebook and/or Instagram app installed on your phone, the text boxes are dynamic, which means you can go ahead and change the username.
Notably, there is no “edit” or “change” signal, and to an ordinary person, it would just appear as if the Meta AI simply extracted the correct username from their pre-installed social app. It’s not too different from the seamless sign-up experience in apps that show users Google Account or Apple ID options to log-in.
Wild things are happening on Meta’s AI app.
The feed is almost entirely boomers who seem to have no idea their conversations with the chatbot are posted publicly.
When I first installed the app on my iPhone 16 Pro, it automatically identified the Instagram account logged into the phone. I tapped on the button with my username plastered over it, and I was directly taken to the main page of the Meta AI app, where I could directly jump into the Discover feed.
There was no warning about the privacy, or how the log of my data would be shared, or even made public knowledge. If you want your AI prompts not to appear in the public Discover feed, you will have to manually enable an option from within the app’s settings section, as described above.
The flow is slightly different on Android, where you see a small “chats will be public” during the initial set-up process. That message appears only once, and not on any other page. Just like the iOS app, you must manually enable the option to prevent your chats from appearing in the Discover feed and to stop the chat prompts from appearing inside Instagram and Facebook.
If you absolutely must use the Meta AI, you can already summon it in WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. In those apps, you can ask Meta AI random questions, ask it to create images, or give it a fun makeover to pictures, among others. Be warned, however, that AI still struggles with hallucination issues, and you must double-check whatever information the chatbot serves you.
Meta has developed plans to create a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence,” according to reporting from The New York Times. The social media giant chose 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, to join the new lab as part of a broader reorganization of Meta’s AI efforts under CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Superintelligence refers to a hypothetical AI system that would exceed human cognitive abilities—a step beyond artificial general intelligence (AGI), which aims to match an intelligent human’s capability for learning new tasks without intensive specialized training.
However, much like AGI, superintelligence remains a nebulous term in the field. Since scientists still poorly understand the mechanics of human intelligence, and because human intelligence resists simple quantification with no single definition, identifying superintelligence when it arrives will present significant challenges.
Meta (META) reportedly has delayed the release of its latest artificial intelligence model, known internally as “Behemoth,” raising concerns among employees about the effectiveness and direction of the company’s massive AI investments.
Mark Zuckerberg may see the world through AI-powered Ray-Bans, but Wall Street just sees it through his company’s ad dollars. And while he’s trying to look beyond the feed to a future with talking glasses and immersive virtual worlds, investors are hoping he’ll stick with what his company does best.
Meta (META) kicked off 2025 with a strong first quarter, delivering better-than-expected financial results and signaling continued momentum in its AI initiatives and core advertising business.
Meta has been playing the AI game for a while now, but unlike ChatGPT, its models are usually integrated into existing platforms rather than standalone apps. That trend ends today — the company has launched the Meta AI app and it appears to do everything ChatGPT does and more.
Powered by the latest Llama 4 model, the app is designed to “get to know you” using the conversations you have and information from your public Meta profiles. It’s designed to work primarily with voice, and Meta says it has improved responses to feel more personal and conversational. There’s experimental voice tech included too, which you can toggle on and off to test — the difference is that apparently, full-duplex speech technology generates audio directly, rather than reading written responses.
The biggest difference between this app and other AI chat apps is the social media twist. There are rumors that OpenAI wants to get into social media too, but Meta has majorly beaten them to the punch, here. The Discover feed is just what it sounds like — a place to share your favorite prompts, responses, and interactions with the AI model for your friends and family to see.
It’s meant to be a way to exchange ideas and find new ways to use the LLM. While a lot of our AI usage isn’t all that interesting, everyone has moments when they want to show people what they managed to get the AI to generate — and that would be the kind of thing you choose to post. I suspect feeds will be full of amusing hallucinations and mistakes as well, however.
The app will also be merging with the Meta View companion app for Ray-Ban Meta glasses, so if you own this bit of hardware, you’ll probably use the Meta AI app a lot. If not, you’ll also be able to access the app on desktop, where you can access the Discover feed, generate images, and test out the in-development rich document editor.
If you’re familiar with Meta AI’s long journey into the European market, it’ll be no surprise to hear that a lot of the Meta AI app features are currently limited to the U.S. and Canada. But if you’re in the right place, then you can go ahead and download the app right away to try all of this new stuff out.
