Meta Connect 2025 Day 1

👋 Good morning or evening, wherever you are. It’s Wednesday.

Day 1 of Meta Connect 2025 delivered a clear message: Meta is betting big on wearables and immersive content.

• New Ray-Ban Display glasses ($799) with a built-in color screen, controlled by a wristband.

• Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 ($379) with double battery life and 3K/60fps video capture.

• Oakley Meta Vanguard ($499) for athletes, integrating Garmin and Strava with 9-hour battery life.

• Quest Hyperscape lets users scan real spaces into VR.

• Horizon TV hub adds Disney+, ESPN, and Hulu with Dolby Atmos support.

• Horizon Engine upgraded for higher fidelity worlds and AI-assisted world building.

Zuck’s 2-minute intro is what everyone’s talking about. Surprisingly cool.

OK let’s keep going ↓

🔥 Creative pulse

This Puma ad sets a new standard and makes the old playbook feel irrelevant.

It’s from Magellan Rubin, a seriously talented artist and one of the coolest people I’ve met recently.

Watch the video. Posted on LinkedIn.

PS: If you’re passionate about AI creative, join the club. It’s $5/month and the people inside will pull you higher than you could go alone. One insight or connection inside could change your life.

💡 Here’s what you should know

• Gemini achieves gold-medal level at ICPC World Finals

  Gemini 2.5 Deep Think solved 10 of 12 problems, including one no human team cracked, marking a breakthrough in competitive programming. By the way, OpenAI got a perfect score of 12/12.

• Google and PayPal partner on AI-powered commerce

  The multiyear deal integrates PayPal’s payment solutions across Google platforms, expands processing through Google Cloud, and advances new agentic shopping and commerce experiences.

• Huawei unveils AI chip roadmap to rival Nvidia

  The company plans four new iterations of its Ascend chips over the next three years, marking its first public disclosure of chipmaking ambitions as it pushes to strengthen China’s domestic semiconductor industry.

• ElevenLabs launches Studio 3.0

  The latest release brings AI voiceovers, music generation, sound effects, captions, and editing into one powerful audio studio, designed for video, podcast, and audiobook production.

• Amazon introduces agentic AI for sellers

  Seller Assistant, powered by Amazon Bedrock, evolves into an always-on partner that helps sellers plan, act, and optimize inventory, compliance, and account health.

• WTO: AI could lift global trade 40% by 2040

  The World Trade Report 2025 projects cross-border flows rising up to 37% and global GDP growing 12–13% if digital divides are narrowed.

• monday.com launches AI agents and CRM suite

  At Elevate 2025, monday.com rolled out monday agents, monday campaigns, and new enterprise features to help organizations scale with speed and precision.

• Detecting and reducing scheming in AI models

  OpenAI and Apollo Research found signs of covert misalignment in frontier models and introduced an early method that cut scheming behaviors by ~30× in controlled tests.

• Alibaba shares rise as China Unicom adopts its AI chips

  State media reports China Unicom will use Alibaba’s Pingtouge chips via Alibaba Cloud, boosting Alibaba stock more than 5% in Hong Kong and 2% in U.S. premarket trading.

• Zoom launches AI Companion 3.0 for workplace productivity

  The update adds proactive agentic AI skills, cross-platform note-taking, custom agent building, and new collaboration features like AI avatars, translations, and automated meeting prep.

• AI on Screen premieres “Sweetwater” short film

  Google’s new program debuted its first film in New York, a father-son project by Michael Keaton Douglas and Sean Douglas exploring grief, memory, and AI’s role in human emotion.

💰 The numbers

• Microsoft struck a $6.2B deal to rent AI compute power in Norway, powered by renewable energy.

• Groq raised $750M at a $6.9B valuation to expand its global AI inference infrastructure.

• Upscale AI launched with a $100M seed round to build an open-standard AI networking platform.

• Scale AI secured a $100M Pentagon contract to bring its AI tech onto top-secret defense networks.

• Irregular raised $80M at a $450M valuation to set AI security standards and test frontier model limits.

• Omnea raised $50M from Insight and Khosla to modernize procurement with AI.

• Aleph raised $29M Series B led by Khosla to expand its AI-native FP&A platform.

• Macroscope raised $30M to speed up software projects with AI-powered bug detection and dev tools.

• Ultralytics raised $30M Series A to scale its computer vision models, including YOLO.

Global AI spending is projected to top $2T by 2026, with the fastest growth in infrastructure and applications (Gartner).

🧠 Thought starters

• AI took your job — can retraining help? (Harvard)

• Reimagining textbooks with generative AI (Google)

• ”AI is a once-in-a-generation technology, we are in the first inning”

😂 Meme of the day

Thanks for reading,

Eddie

Join the AI Creative Club (you’ll find me there). It’s not only for artists and filmmakers…it’s for anyone who recognizes this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn as much as you can about AI to multiply your impact...to become superhuman. Remember, creativity is just intelligence having fun. This club is for ultra curious people, and if you’ve made it this far…you’re pretty damn curious and probably the smartest one in your circle of friends. It would be my honor to have you in there.

👋 Connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X (Twitter)

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