LONDON: Facebook is creating a product team to work on the “metaverse,” a digital world where people can move between different devices and communicate in a virtual environment, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday.
The team will be part of the company’s virtual reality organization, the group’s executive Andrew Bosworth said in a Facebook post.
“You can think about the metaverse as an embodied Internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in an interview last week.
Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has invested heavily in virtual reality and augmented reality, developing hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets and working on AR glasses and wristband technologies.
It has also bought a bevy of VR gaming studios, including BigBox VR. It has about 10,000 employees working on virtual reality, The Information reported in March.
Zuckerberg has said he thinks it makes sense to invest deeply to shape what he bets will be the next big computing platform.
“I believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile Internet, and creating this product group is the next step in our journey to help build it,” he said on his Monday Facebook post.
He told The Verge: “If we do this well, I think over the next five years or so ... we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
Facebook sets up new team to work on the ‘metaverse’
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Facebook sets up new team to work on the ‘metaverse’
- Facebook establishes new team to work on metaverse, a digital world where people can move between different devices and virtual environments
Malaysia, Indonesia become first to block Musk’s Grok over AI deepfakes
- Authorities in both countries acted over the weekend, citing concerns about non-consensual and sexual deepfakes
- Regulators say existing controls cannot prevent fake pornographic content, especially involving women and minors
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia and Indonesia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and non-consensual images.
The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children.
Regulators in the two Southeast Asian nations said existing controls were not preventing the creation and spread of fake pornographic content, particularly involving women and minors. Indonesia’s government temporarily blocked access to Grok on Saturday, followed by Malaysia on Sunday.
“The government sees non-consensual sexual deepfakes as a serious violation of human rights, dignity and the safety of citizens in the digital space,” Indonesia’s Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid said in a statement Saturday.
The ministry said the measure was intended to protect women, children and the broader community from fake pornographic content generated using AI.
Initial findings showed that Grok lacks effective safeguards to stop users from creating and distributing pornographic content based on real photos of Indonesian residents, Alexander Sabar, director general of digital space supervision, said in a separate statement. He said such practices risk violating privacy and image rights when photos are manipulated or shared without consent, causing psychological, social and reputational harm.
In Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission ordered a temporary restriction on Grok on Sunday after what it said was “repeated misuse” of the tool to generate obscene, sexually explicit and non-consensual manipulated images, including content involving women and minors.
The regulator said notices issued this month to X Corp. and xAI demanding stronger safeguards drew responses that relied mainly on user reporting mechanisms.
“The restriction is imposed as a preventive and proportionate measure while legal and regulatory processes are ongoing,” it said, adding that access will remain blocked until effective safeguards are put in place.
Launched in 2023, Grok is free to use on X. Users can ask it questions on the social media platform and tag posts they’ve directly created or replies to posts from other users. Last summer the company added an image generator feature, Grok Imagine, that included a so-called “spicy mode” that can generate adult content.
The Southeast Asian restrictions come amid mounting scrutiny of Grok elsewhere, including in the European Union, Britain, India and France. Grok last week limited image generation and editing to paying users following a global backlash over sexualized deepfakes of people, but critics say it did not fully address the problem.
