meta

LOOKING cool is no sweat for Kylie Jenner — thanks to her latest cosmetics creation.

The US beauty mogul posed in a see-through slip dress to help promote a powder which claims to be sweat and humidity-proof.

It is the latest launch from her Kylie Cosmetics range, which has helped the 28-year-old rake in a £500million fortune.

Meanwhile Kylie, who is dating Oscar-nominated actor Timothée Chalamet, has provided the AI assistant’s voice for a pair of smart glasses.

She also helped design the £359 oval Starfire Kylie Edition shades for tech giant Meta.

Wearers can take photos and videos, make and answer phone calls, listen to music and ­interact with a virtual assistant voiced by Kylie.

Read More on Kylie Jenner

SHOCK SUIT

Kylie Jenner’s private chef claims she suffered miscarriage due to ‘exhaustion’

SALE FAIL

Kylie Jenner pulls her massive $48 million Holmby Hills mansion off the market

The star said: “I recorded all these little lines.

“You put them on in the morning and it says, ‘Rise and shine’.

“It just felt like something I’d actually reach for every single day.”

The new hi-tech specs come in 26 different styles and eight colour options.

They include selections of Meta Adventurer (rectangular) and Meta Fury (squared) spectacles, as well as Meta Glasses by Kylie (with a slim oval shape).

They’re all “smart glasses”, which means they have built-in cameras, microphones, and an AI assistant – but not a display.

Published on
24/06/2026 – 14:16 GMT+2

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has given the green light to develop a prediction market app, according to the New York Times, as Meta moves to capitalise on one of the fastest-growing sectors in tech and finance.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

The app is currently being referred to as Arena internally and would let users earn points for correctly predicting the outcomes of events such as sports results, political developments and stock market moves but without any real money changing hands, at least initially.

It would operate independently of Meta’s existing social platforms, though those could funnel users towards it, according to the reporting.

What is a prediction market?

A prediction market is essentially a financial exchange where people buy and sell contracts or bets tied to the outcome of real-world events.

Each contract is a simple yes-or-no question, such as whether a certain candidate will win an election, a team will come out first in a championship or if a major political figure will pass by a certain date.

On Polymarket and Kalshi, the two most popular prediction market platforms, users buy contracts that pay out $1 if they are right and nothing if they are wrong.

As more people trade those contracts, the price reflects the market’s probability of the event occurring. If a bet is worth 40 cents, there’s a 40% chance of it happening, according to the people who have placed bets.

Fans of prediction markets argue the mechanism produces more accurate forecasts than polls or political analysts because participants have real money on the line.

Polymarket and Kalshi

The two dominant platforms in the space are Polymarket and Kalshi, which together generated around 85–90% of the roughly $44 billion (€40bn) in total trading volume recorded in 2025.

Polymarket, founded in 2020 by New York University dropout Shayne Coplan, operates globally on the blockchain. In October 2025, the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company invested $2 billion (€1.8bn) in the platform, in a major sign that Wall Street was taking the sector seriously.

Kalshi, founded in 2018 by two MIT graduates, spent years winning regulatory approval before launching as the first prediction market sanctioned by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

The turning point came in October 2024, when a US court ruled Kalshi could legally offer election contracts 32 days before the presidential election. Monthly trading volume has since surged from less than $5 billion (€4.6bn) in September 2025 to around $24 billion (€21.8bn) in April 2026, overtaking the roughly $14 billion (€12.7bn) wagered monthly through legal or traditional US sportsbooks.

Donald Trump Jr. becoming an investor in Polymarket and a paid adviser to Kalshi, while federal regulators adopted a more permissive stance, also helped fuel the boom.

The risks

The boom has not come without controversy and legal cases have mounted, with a former special forces soldier getting arrested over allegations he used insider knowledge of a US operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to place a winning trade on Polymarket worth around $400,000 (€365,000).

Some US states have begun suing the platforms, arguing they are running illegal gambling operations without proper licences. The Trump administration has responded by suing the states that have moved to ban prediction markets, creating a messy legal standoff between federal and state authority.

A New York Times review found that Polymarket published hundreds of false and misleading social media posts, while Politico uncovered a campaign to pay influencers to praise the platform’s supposed accuracy.

Whether Meta’s gamified, cashless version of the concept can avoid those pitfalls or will simply serve as a gateway to them remains unclear.

Meta has paused a new company-wide program of tracking its employees’ computer usage which has been plagued by internal frustration.

The program was started only two months ago as part of an effort by Meta to gather data on how people used computers, including mouse clicks and keystrokes, that could be used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models.

It was met immediately with upset from employees who were to have their every online action at work tracked and recorded, but also concerned about where the data was going and how it would be protected.

Meta halted the program on Monday after realising some of the collected data had been left potentially accessible to anyone inside the company.

A Meta spokesman confirmed to the BBC that the program, named internally the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), was “on pause for now” as the company investigates the issue.

“We have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees,” the spokesman added.

The pause follows weeks of blow-back from workers at the company, led by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, to being tracked at work.

In an initial response to worker frustration – which was displayed in part through a petition signed by nearly 2,000 Meta workers demanding that the MCI program be cancelled – Meta said it would allow workers to not be tracked for up to 30 minutes at a time.

“That was just an attempt at damage control,” one current employee told the BBC. The person asked not to be identified.

Another Meta employee, who also asked not to be identified, said that while a lot of technical workers inside the company are open to the idea of improving its AI models and being more competitive in a field dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI, the fact that tracking “was forced on us, there was no consent” left people angry.

“I’ve never seen morale here so bad,” the employee said.

In addition to the tracking program, frustration inside Meta has grown as it has done extensive layoffs, and reorganised many employees and their work around AI initiatives, on which the company is spending up to $145bn (£109bn) this year alone.

Employees have even openly insulted management, external in an internal meeting on the AI-driven changes, according to a report in Wired.

While Meta has long had a reputation in the technology industry as a company that frequently reorganises internal teams around new projects, the changes and spending in an effort to catch up on AI feels like “chasing your tail”, a person who recently left Meta after several years said.

“The direction this company is going in is depressing”, the former employee said. “Exhausting and depressing.”

June 9 (UPI) — The European Commission ordered Meta to allow competing artificial intelligence assistants to access WhatsApp while it investigates the company for antitrust violations.

The company must restore access by next week as it was until October, when the competition could use WhatsApp for free.

“In rapidly evolving markets, competition can be lost long before a final decision is adopted. This is why these interim measures will remain in place for the duration of the investigation, in order to prevent harm that would be almost impossible to repair,” Teresa Ribera, executive vice president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, said in a statement. “These interim measures will safeguard competition in the growing market for AI assistants, by preserving a key entry point to reach consumers in Europe — WhatsApp — and allowing AI companies to innovate, scale up and reach their full potential.”

The EC began its investigation in December around the same time Italy called foul of the alleged anti-competitive move by the company. Italy folded its complaint into the EC probe. After Brussels warned in February that it may force the company to open back up, in March Meta allowed the other companies in but began charging them fees. Brazil has levied similar complaints.

Meta has said WhatsApp’s business platform was not built to carry AI chatbots and that competitors can reach users through other channels.

“The European Commission has decided that OpenAI and some of the largest companies in the world can use the paid-for WhatsApp Business product for free. This is regulatory overreach subsidized by the many European companies that pay. We will appeal,” a Meta spokesperson told Politico.

Meta is also appealing a $228.34 million fine from the EU for violations of the Digital Markets Act.

If the company ignores the order, it can face fines of up to 10% of its annual revenue.

WhatsApp disrupted phishing attempts linked to NSO, blacklisted by the US for security concerns.

Meta has said it is ⁠filing a federal US ⁠court contempt order against Israeli spyware firm NSO Group for violating a permanent injunction that barred it from ever ⁠targeting WhatsApp and its users.

The company said on Monday that its WhatsApp messaging service disrupted new spear phishing attempts linked to NSO, an ⁠entity blacklisted by the United States government for engaging in activities that are contrary to national security or foreign policy interests.

These attempts were similar to previous “1-click phishing campaigns”, aimed to trick users into clicking ‌malicious links and direct them to external websites, Meta said in a blogpost.

A “1-click” is a type of cyberattack where a single click on a malicious link or attachment is sufficient to compromise a victim’s device or account, without requiring them to enter their credentials.

Meta said WhatsApp took down test accounts ⁠and groups created by NSO on its platform. ⁠NSO did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Last year, a US court ordered NSO to stop targeting Meta’s WhatsApp, a development the spyware ⁠company warned could put it out of business.

While the ruling significantly reduced the punitive damages NSO ⁠owed Meta to $4m from an ⁠initial $167m, the injunction itself was seen as a substantial challenge for the company, which faces ongoing accusations of enabling human rights abuses through its Pegasus hacking tool.

Meta ‌said on Monday that last month it was joined by 12 prominent civil rights organisations, a coalition of security researchers, privacy advocates ‌and ‌digital rights experts, who filed their amicus briefs to fight NSO’s appeal against the permanent injunction.

Bejing tightens scrutiny of artificial intelligence industry amid intensifying geopolitical rivalry with the US over the technology.

China has said it is blocking tech giant Meta from an acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) startup Manus, tightening scrutiny of investment in domestic startups developing frontier technologies from the United States.

China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said on Monday that it was prohibiting the foreign acquisition of Manus, without specifically naming Meta.

The move highlights Beijing’s increased concern over US acquisitions of Chinese AI talent and intellectual property, as Washington tries to limit Chinese tech firms’ access to advanced US chips.

It was not immediately clear on what grounds China was seeking the annulment of a deal involving a Singapore-based company and how, if at all, a completed acquisition transaction would be unwound.

Manus, which has Chinese roots but is based in Singapore, provides general-purpose AI agents designed to carry out complex tasks with minimal human intervention.

The call to annul the deal was made by the commission in accordance with Chinese laws and regulations, the NDRC’s statement said.

California-based Meta said in response to the statement: “The transaction complied fully with applicable law. We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry.”

A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the Trump administration “will continue defending America’s leading and innovative technology sector against undue foreign interference of any sort”.

Meta announced in December that it was acquiring Manus. It is a rare case of a major US tech group buying an AI company with strong links to China. The deal was forecasted to help expand AI offerings across Meta’s platforms.

Meta had said there would be “no continuing Chinese ownership interests in Manus” and that Manus would discontinue its services and operations in China.

But China said in January that it would investigate whether the acquisition would be consistent with its laws and regulations.

After a $75m fundraising round led by US venture firm Benchmark in May 2025, Manus shut its China offices, laying off dozens of employees. It then moved its operations to Singapore.

This enabled Manus’s parent company, Butterfly Effect, to reincorporate ⁠in Singapore and bypass US investment restrictions on Chinese AI firms, as well as Chinese rules limiting domestic AI firms’ ability to transfer their IP and capital overseas.

The Chinese bid to block the deal comes weeks before a planned mid-May summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

Meta will lay off 8,000 workers while Microsoft is offering buyouts to 8,750 people, a first for the Windows maker.

Meta is laying off about 8,000 workers, or about 10 percent of its workforce, the company has said as it continues to ramp up spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure and highly paid AI-expert hires.

On Thursday, the company said it was making the cuts for the sake of efficiency and to allow new investments in parts of its business, as first reported by Bloomberg, which also said the company will leave about 6,000 jobs unfilled.

Also on Thursday, Microsoft said it was offering voluntary buyouts to thousands of its US employees.

The software giant plans to make the offers in early May to about 8,750 people, or 7 percent of its US workforce, according to two people familiar with the plan who were not authorised to speak about it publicly.

While an alternative to the sudden layoffs removing tech workers from peers like Meta and Oracle, the savings are likely tied to a similar industry upheaval that is requiring huge spending on the costs of artificial intelligence.

Meta has already warned investors that its 2026 expenses will grow significantly — to the range of $162bn to $169bn — driven by infrastructure costs and employee compensation, particularly for the AI experts it has been hiring at eye-popping pay levels.

This week, Meta also said it was breaking ground on an AI-optimised data centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a $1bn investment and its 28th data centre in the US.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives welcomed Meta’s cuts in a note to investors on Thursday.

He said he sees it as part of a strategy of using AI tools to “automate tasks that once required large teams, allowing the company to streamline operations and reduce costs while maintaining productivity, driving an increased need for a leaner operating structure”.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington state, has spent billions of dollars on operating an ever-expanding global network of data centres that power cloud computing services, AI systems and its own suite of productivity tools, including the AI assistant Copilot.

CNBC reported earlier on Thursday on a memo from Microsoft’s chief people officer, Amy Coleman, announcing the voluntary retirement plan.

“Our hope is that this program gives those eligible the choice to take that next step on their own terms, with generous company support,” Coleman wrote, according to CNBC.

Meta stock fell 2.3 percent on Thursday, while Microsoft stock ended the day down 3.97 percent.