India has emerged as WhatsApp’s largest market, with the platform possessing more than 500 million users while expanding beyond messaging into payments and business services in the South Asian giant. As per Zuckerberg’s announcement, Will Cathcart, the current head of WhatsApp, will move to ⁠a new role within Meta after seven years leading the messaging service.

Announcing Shah’s appointment, Zuckerberg said, “Kunal Shah will join Meta as WhatsApp’s next leader. Kunal built CRED into one of India’s most important technology companies, and he brings the kind of builder mentality and global perspective that will serve him well in running the world’s biggest messaging app. I look forward to working with Kunal to continue to make WhatsApp the best service for billions of people and millions of businesses.”

Meta’s investment into Cred (formed in 2018) is also one of the largest into India’s fintech sector in recent years. While the valuation surpassed the USD 3.5 billion mark, registered by CRED in its last funding round in 2025, it came lower than its 2022 peak of USD 6.4 billion.

The deal gives Meta a minority stake in Bengaluru-based CRED without allowing the Silicon Valley tech giant access to CRED customer ‌data. Talking about CRED, the latter operates a members-only platform for consumers with high credit scores, through which it offers products spanning payments, lending, insurance, wealth management, and lifestyle services.

As per the company, it serves 17 million members on a monthly basis, apart from processing more than 40% of India’s ⁠credit card bill payments and managing over 240 billion rupees (USD 2.5 billion) of lending assets for partner financial institutions.

While CRED will be using the freshly raised capital to accelerate its organizational growth, it will also strengthen its leadership and ⁠institutional capabilities, apart from expanding across product categories. Miten Sampat, who has led strategy and finance at CRED since 2020, has been appointed interim CEO.

Shah, who will be transitioning from fintech founder to the CEO of a popular global messaging platform, is known as an entrepreneur, angel investor, and one of the most influential figures in India’s startup ecosystem. He first came into prominence in 2009 by establishing a cashback promotions company, PaisaBack, which he later described as the key business model inspiring the formation of FreeCharge, which Shah, along with Sandeep Tandon, created in 2010.

In April 2015, Snapdeal announced the acquisition of FreeCharge in a cash-and-stock deal widely reported to be about 2,800 crore rupees (roughly USD 400–450 million). By 2022, as per the Mint, Shah was among India’s most active angel investors by number of deals during the year. Another 2021 Moneycontrol profile reported making more than 200 angel investments, including stakes in fintech companies such as Razorpay and BharatPe.

Shah, who also featured in Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 list in 2016, graduated with a degree in philosophy from Wilson College. He later got enrolled in an MBA program at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies. However, he left the course midway to pursue entrepreneurship. Known best for his first-principles method of problem-solving, Shah’s interviews, speeches, and social media posts have earned him a cult status among Indian founders, investors, and business leaders.

Sha will be relocating to California’s Menlo Park, where he will work from Meta’s headquarters while shaping the future of WhatsApp.

The post Meet Kunal Shah: Meta’s surprising yet powerful pick for WhatsApp CEO’s post appeared first on International Finance.

Known as the ‘AI Mode’, the feature will create a new way to search the popular social media platform by using Meta AI to surface answers pulled from public posts across the portal, including “Groups” and “Reels”. Instead of scrolling through search results, users will be able to ask a question in plain language and get a synthesised answer based on what people are actually discussing.

“AI Mode is a new way to get answers to your questions right on Facebook thanks to Meta AI. From exploring your Feed to searching for something specific, AI Mode uses Meta AI to give you answers grounded in what people are saying publicly across our apps, like in Groups and Reels, so you get real perspectives and experiences rather than a generic list of search results,” Meta said.

“It’s another way Meta AI, powered by Muse Spark, is showing up for you in the experiences you already use. Whether you’re searching or diving deeper into content, Meta AI is right there, ready to help,” the tech giant added further.

The launch of the “AI Mode” follows Meta’s quiet debut of “Forum”, a Reddit-style app that includes its own AI-powered “Ask” tab, allowing users to ask questions and get answers pulled from discussions happening across Facebook Groups.

Facebook has also added editing tools that let users play around with collage cutouts and transition effects for their video montages. Another new feature is the AI-powered photo presets, which will allow an individual to change up his/her look with different clothes, hairstyles, and accessories.

The update on the image front also comes at the right time, as the football fans, amid the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2026, will be able to virtually wear their favourite team jerseys just by tapping the “AI Edit” icon in “Stories” and choosing “Wear It”. They will also have the option of going directly to their profile picture and selecting “Restyle Profile Picture with AI” and “Wardrobe”.

Meta has been attempting to add new life to once-popular, now-dormant Facebook by adding AI features to the social media and networking site. In February 2026, the company introduced animated profile pictures that bring still photos to life — adding a wave or placing a virtual party hat on someone’s head.

In the following month, the tech giant added another AI feature to “Facebook Marketplace” that automatically replies to buyer messages on sellers’ behalf.

Earlier in June, Facebook launched an AI assistant for creators that offers personalised suggestions (including the best times to post and summaries of what audiences are saying in the comments) based on a creator’s content and performance history.

The post Meet ‘AI Mode’, Meta’s new attempt to infuse life in Facebook appeared first on International Finance.

“Unfortunately, your role has been eliminated as part of today’s reorganisation. If you are already in the office, we ask that you please gather any personal items at your desk and head home. It’s always sad to say good-bye to people who have contributed to our mission and to building this company. I feel the weight of that,” read another email of his that landed in the inboxes of those who got affected by the layoffs on May 20.

After this, Zuckerberg immediately shot another memo to Meta’s employees, where he stated, “I want to be clear that we do not expect other company-wide layoffs this year. I also want to acknowledge that we haven’t been as clear as we aspire to be in our communication, and that’s one area I want to make sure we improve.”

As per him, the “changes” are part of a far-reaching overhaul that is happening at Meta in 2026, with the Facebook owner surging its AI investments in ⁠a bid to centre AI agents in both its product offerings and its internal operations.

While the layoffs have hit about 20% of the tech giant’s workforce, it has more or less followed the same pattern of “AI-linked job cuts” among major US companies this year, particularly in the tech sector. Meta has also closed an additional 6,000 open roles as ‌part of ⁠the restructuring process.

The “transferred” Meta employees will now be working on initiatives including Applied AI Engineering (AAI) and Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA) XFN, two teams previously announced by CTO Andrew Bosworth as part of Meta’s “AI for Work” efforts.

These two divisions have been tasked to develop AI agents that can autonomously carry out tasks currently performed by ⁠human staffers. Central Analytics, also a destination for transfer and mentioned in Bosworth’s announcement, will aim to measure productivity and analytics for agent development.

The latest layoffs mark Meta’s biggest company-wide cuts since Zuckerberg launched his 2022-23 “Year of Efficiency”, a period that saw the removal of around 21,000 jobs across the social media giant. Talking about Meta’s capital expenditure on the AI front, the venture has forecast capital expenditure between USD 125 billion and USD 145 billion in 2026, more than double its 2025 spending.

Meta’s severance package includes 16 weeks of base pay, along with two additional weeks for every year worked at Meta. The company would also cover health insurance premiums for employees and their dependents for up to 18 months.

The laid-off employees would continue receiving vested stock grants and paid time off dues. The social media giant also offered three months of external job-search assistance through Lee Hecht Harrison.

The post Meta conducts layoffs, internal transfers in its AI focus appeared first on International Finance.

Meta’s action follows Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration in January 2026, where he identified his company’s next growth area, glasses, which billions of people wear for vision correction.

According to the tech giant, the new products, “Ray-Ban Meta Blayzer Optics” and “Ray-Ban Meta Scriber Optics,” would become available at optical retailers ⁠in the United States and select international markets on April 14.

“The new models will feature overextension hinges, interchangeable nose pads and optician-adjustable temple tips to make them adaptable to each user’s unique face shape. The Facebook parent plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in its pursuit of ‘personal superintelligence,’ in which advanced gadgets, among other products, would bring the benefits of AI to individual users. Meta develops its AI glasses in partnership ‌with ⁠Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica,” reported Reuters.

Discussing global smart glasses, shipments in the domain reached 9.6 million units in 2025, with Meta alone accounting for about 76.1% of the total. As per International Data Corporation’s research director Ramon Llamas, in 2026, the figure is expected to reach 13.4 million units.

The social media conglomerate launched Meta ⁠Ray-Ban Display glasses at USD 799 last year, with a built-in display that enables users to read messages, follow navigation directions and interact with AI services without using a phone.

Recently, Meta delayed ⁠the model’s global rollout, citing a mismatch between strong demand and short supply. The Display smart glasses can also be ordered with prescription lenses for an additional USD 200.

And Meta is not alone in bringing out the next-generation smart gadgets. Snap, too, has established ⁠an independent subsidiary for its augmented reality (AR) smart glasses and is reportedly gearing up for the product launch. Google, on the other hand, has partnered with Warby Parker to launch AI glasses.

The post Meta unveils Ray-Ban smart glasses for prescription eyewear users appeared first on International Finance.

These individuals have pushed boundaries, taken risks, and used their influence to address global challenges, leaving a significant (and positive) mark on history. Their success is not just measured by their wealth but by the legacy they leave behind, whether it’s in the form of technological innovation, leadership, or philanthropy.

Making a top entrepreneurs list is tricky because none of these people followed a clean path. Most of them messed up, got lucky, took huge risks, or just refused to quit when they probably should have.

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011)

Jobs was not known for being easy to work with, but he cared deeply about how things felt to the user. He turned computers, phones, and even packaging into emotional products. Apple blended tech with the changing culture.

Bill Gates (October 28, 1955 – Present)

Gates saw software as the future before most people understood what software even meant. Microsoft didn’t just build programmes; it shaped how businesses and homes used computers for decades.

Warren Buffett (August 30, 1930 – Present)

Buffett proves you do not need flashy ideas to win big. He focused on patience, discipline, and long-term thinking. Slow, boring decisions, done consistently, made him one of the most successful investors ever.

Elon Musk (June 28, 1971 – Present)

Musk bets on things that sound unrealistic at first. Electric cars, reusable rockets, brain chips. Some ideas work, some do not, but he keeps pushing industries forward, whether people are ready or not.

Oprah Winfrey (January 29, 1954 – Present)

Oprah turned her voice and authenticity into an empire. Media, publishing, television, she built trust first, business second. That trust is why her influence lasted so long.

Jeff Bezos (January 12, 1964 – Present)

Bezos was obsessed with customers while everyone else chased short-term profits. Amazon started with books and quietly became part of everyday life. Convenience won.

Larry Ellison (August 17, 1944 – Present)

Ellison built Oracle with pure competitiveness. He was not shy about ambition. Databases are not glamorous, but they run the world behind the scenes.

Mark Zuckerberg (May 14, 1984 – Present)

Zuckerberg changed how people communicate fast. Facebook grew faster than anyone expected, and with that growth came huge responsibility and plenty of controversy.

Richard Branson (July 18, 1950 – Present)

Branson made business look fun. Airlines, music, space, he jumped industries without losing personality. Branding and boldness were his biggest tools.

Larry Page (March 26, 1973 – Present) and Sergey Brin (August 21, 1973 – Present)

These two organised the internet. Google made information usable, searchable, and instantly available, and changed how humans think.

The post Entrepreneurship: Top 10 individuals who made the concept impactful appeared first on International Finance.

In reference to a well-known quote about Julius Caesar and his unyielding desire for power, Zuckerberg’s t-shirt said, “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “Zuck or nothing.” In contrast, the phrase “Mundus sine Caesaribus”—”a world without Caesars”—was printed on Graber’s shirt. The shirt served as a scathing indictment of Zuckerberg’s centralised vision.

In contrast to Zuckerberg’s centralised approach to building Meta, Graber aims to manage and develop Bluesky, a dominant social media platform that went live in early 2024, she tells TIME. She claims these digital firms have established virtual kingdoms where their CEOs present themselves as self-made kings.

In the hyper-centralised world of social media, where internet giants like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg make decisions on their own regarding privacy, censorship, and data harvesting for artificial intelligence, this message is becoming more and more relevant. While Bluesky’s daily usage increased by 500%, X lost 115,000 users the day after the election as consumers sought a haven from right-wing trolls, sponsored posts, and disinformation bots. However, X’s daily active user count in the United States was still ten times higher than that of Bluesky. Among the 35 million users of Bluesky today are Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, George Takei, and Stephen King. It’s the world’s biggest decentralised social network by far.

Beyond its sizable liberal fan base, Bluesky still has a way to go before becoming profitable and widely used. However, Graber asserts that her goal is not to overtake Musk or Zuckerberg as the dominant figure on social media. She declares, “We oppose centralised authority prescribing the rules for everybody else. We would rather not establish a future in which I am a more benevolent emperor. We envision a society in which monarchs are completely unnecessary.”

Bluesky’s interface visually resembles Twitter, with an endless scroll of text posts that are no longer than 300 characters. New users can quickly engage in discussions by using “starter packs,” which are user-generated collections of accounts centred around common interests. Topics such as memes, pop culture, politics, and sports are especially popular among users.

The primary distinction between Twitter and Bluesky is that the latter’s open-source protocol enables users to personalise their content feeds and algorithms. Like Reddit, Bluesky has seen the emergence of close-knit communities that have established censorship guidelines and communication methods. Additionally, because of Bluesky’s architecture, users can move their posts and follows to another platform as long as it uses the same protocol.

It wasn’t Graber who came up with Bluesky. In 2019, Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, funded a small group of academics and announced Bluesky as a decentralised version of Twitter. Graber, who had formerly worked on bitcoin projects and had a long-standing interest in decentralised technology, offered to lead the company in 2021. Graber was living in a large communal home with other entrepreneurs during the lockdown in San Francisco.

According to Rose Wang, Graber’s former roommate and current COO of Bluesky, the company’s growth was influenced by the particulars of COVID-19. “How do you get people to feel safe together in this time? There were a lot of community challenges. I believe that our perspectives on creating communities online are greatly influenced by Jay’s and my experiences creating communities offline,” she said.

As per PitchBook, female-led companies in Silicon Valley remain rare, securing only 6% of venture capital deals. Graber says that her and Wang’s identities have shaped their approach to leadership. “As women with extensive online experience,” she explains, “we’ve made moderation a top priority—because we believe it’s essential to building a healthy social platform.”

Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022. He initially argued in favour of making its algorithm open-source, which could be derived from Bluesky’s technology and research, but he swiftly stopped supporting Bluesky instead. After searching elsewhere, Graber and her team eventually raised $8 million and then $15 million in investment rounds. They also decided to turn Bluesky into a public benefit corporation, which means that they must work for the public and social good in addition to making money.

Demand surged in 2023 as Bluesky prepared to launch its invite-only system, with many potential users pleading with them to remove the platform’s limitations. However, Graber decided to keep Bluesky small until the decentralised tools were developed because they weren’t yet ready.

Currently, Graber oversees more than 100 content moderator contractors and 24 staff members who strive to eliminate harmful posts such as aggressive threats and child sexual abuse information. Dorsey was upset with Bluesky’s content moderation strategy and quit the board last spring, claiming that Bluesky was centralising and that its moderating tools were becoming overly intrusive.

To determine what people see and what they don’t, Graber contends that users should largely design their own moderation systems. She explains, “You have this open right to leave—where you can build your own thing if you disagree with the services, moderation actions, or design choices.”

According to Rudy Fraser, a technologist who started the feed, popular feeds on Bluesky include Science and Blacksky, for Black community building, with 370,000 monthly active users. “Some of the feeds are centred around people who are discovering shared affinity in gender or their identities. I want to create an open network so that communities and individuals who feel excluded from the current social media platforms and power structures can create their own spaces,” Graber noted.

Bluesky continues to lean far to the left politically, and conservatives have complained about being harassed or censored on the site. Additionally, Bluesky’s user growth has slowed considerably since its post-election surge. Furthermore, its 35 million users are insignificant compared to the hundreds of millions on X and Meta’s Threads, not to mention the billions on Instagram and TikTok.

Graber acknowledges that the platform has experienced several ups and downs, but remains unconcerned about the slow growth. To avoid the mistakes of previous social media platforms that prioritised growth over user experience, she feels comfortable taking her time. “Social networks can degrade the main experience of the feed because they have become too accustomed to believing that users are trapped because of the network effects. This monetisation model is likely to reach some natural limits where people grow weary of it, so it won’t last forever,” she explained.

Graber and Wang must now come up with a new revenue strategy that goes beyond using user data to build AI models or running constant advertisements. Graber says she is considering monetising Bluesky’s marketplaces through custom tools or subscription models, despite not having specific plans in place.

Graber and Wang are more than happy to let independent business owners create other platforms on top of Bluesky’s AT protocol, which are likewise open-sourced and compatible with one another, as Bluesky scuttles toward monetisation. Remember how standard email protocols served as the foundation for Gmail, Yahoo, and other inboxes. These new initiatives include Sky-light, a TikTok clone supported by Mark Cuban, and Flashes, an Instagram substitute that has received over 100,000 downloads.

The duo won’t stop anyone from constructing a Bluesky clone on top of the infrastructure. According to Wang, “Greensky can appear the following morning if Bluesky, the server, shuts down overnight. We are frequently asked, ‘How can we trust you?’ Don’t trust us, is our response. Have faith in the infrastructure.”

Only good days ahead

In April 2025, Bluesky rolled out a new verification system, taking the competition with X to the next level. The social platform formerly relied on an unconventional self-verification system, where users could “authenticate” themselves by including custom domains in their web handles. Now it’s adopting a more proactive and traditional verification strategy, with the Bluesky team reportedly identifying notable accounts and bestowing blue check marks.

“It’ll be a rolling process as the feature stabilises, and then we’ll launch a public form that people can use to request verification,” Graber said, adding that the highest-priority accounts right now are government officials, news organisations, journalists, and celebrities. A 2024 study from the MIT Technology Review reveals that Bluesky has grown, and so has the uptick in impersonators posing as public figures. To meet growing demand for ways to confirm that accounts are legit, some Bluesky power users have taken it upon themselves to create their own verification systems. As the app continues to attract celebrity users (former US President Barack Obama joined the platform earlier this spring), a more formal verification process will help reassure public figures that Bluesky is a safe digital hangout space.

In addition to this traditional, top-down verification approach, Bluesky offers “trusted verifier” status to a select group of vetted organisations. These organisations will be given a scalloped blue check mark on their Bluesky accounts. The initial batch of publications selected as trusted verifiers includes The New York Times and WIRED, with more in the works. This same system was initially followed by Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, where the rule was: you had to actually be famous and verifiable in the public eye.

While users cannot request verification directly, more importantly, Bluesky will not “sell” verification checkmarks like X and now Instagram and Facebook.

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According to a recent prediction by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, mid-level engineers who write the company’s computer code will be replaced by AI. Even coding itself has been deemed outdated by Jensen Huang of NVIDIA.

Bill Gates acknowledges that the rapid advancement of AI is “profound and even a little bit scary,” but he also applauds the potential for it to make elite knowledge widely available. In his ideal world, AI will provide free, excellent medical advice and tutoring in place of programmers, physicians, and educators.

Despite the hype, artificial intelligence cannot act or “think” for itself at this time. In fact, the key question that determines whether AI improves learning or degrades comprehension is whether we should let AI simply forecast patterns or demand that it explain, justify, and be rooted in the rules of our world.

Artificial intelligence requires human judgment not only to oversee its output but also to incorporate scientific boundaries that provide it with guidance, stability, and interpretability. Physicist Alan Sokal recently likened AI chatbots to an oral exam taken by a mediocre student.

According to Sokal, a user may not pick up on an inaccurate chatbot unless they are extremely knowledgeable about a particular topic. That, in his opinion, sums up AI’s purported “knowledge” quite nicely. However, by anticipating word sequences, it simulates comprehension.

This makes it difficult for “creative” AI systems to tell what is real and what isn’t, and there are arguments over whether big language models can understand cultural nuances. Teachers concerned about AI tutors might impair students’ critical thinking skills, and doctors worried about algorithmic misdiagnosis are highlighting the same issue. Machine learning excels at identifying patterns, but it lacks the deep understanding that arises from systematic, cumulative human experience and the scientific method.

Here, a burgeoning AI movement provides a way forward. It focuses on directly integrating human knowledge into machine learning processes. MINNs (Mechanistically Informed Neural Networks) and PINNs (Physics-Informed Neural Networks) are two variants. The concept is straightforward, even though the names sound technical. Artificial intelligence improves when it complies with the laws of physics, biological systems, or social dynamics. Thus, people are still needed to produce knowledge as well as use it. AI functions best when it can learn.

An algorithm is programmed to adhere to accepted scientific principles rather than relying on historical data to make educated guesses about what works. Consider a family-run lavender farm in Indiana. Blooming time is crucial for businesses of this nature. Early or late harvesting weakens the potency of essential oils, lowering quality and profitability. It could be a waste of time for an AI to search through pointless patterns. But a MINN begins with the biology of plants. It makes accurate predictions promptly and with financial significance by using equations that relate blooming to heat, light, frost, and water. However, it only functions when it understands the workings of the chemical, biological, and physical worlds. Humans create science, which is the source of that knowledge.

Consider using this method to detect cancer: breast tumours produce heat due to increased blood flow and metabolism, allowing predictive artificial intelligence to identify tumours from thousands of thermal images using only patterns in the data. In contrast, a MINN, such as the one that was recently created by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, incorporates bioheat transfer laws straight into the model using body-surface temperature data.

So, rather than speculating, it knows how heat flows through the body and can use the physics of heat flow through tissue to determine what’s wrong, what’s causing it, why, and exactly where it is. Based solely on the way cancer alters the body’s heat signature, a MINN was able to predict the location and size of a tumour in one instance within a few millimetres.

The message is very clear. People are still necessary. Our role is not going away as AI advances in sophistication. It is changing. An algorithm that generates strange, biased, or incorrect results must be called out by humans. That is not solely an AI shortcoming. It is the greatest human strength.

The increasing sophistication of AI is not the true danger. That is, we might cease applying our intelligence. Treating AI like an oracle runs the risk of making us lose our ability to think critically, ask questions, and spot illogical behaviour. Thankfully, this does not have to be how things turn out in the future.

Erik Otarola-Castillo, an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, said, “We can create systems that are open, comprehensible, and based on the body of human knowledge regarding ethics, culture, and science. Interpretable AI research can be funded by policymakers. Students who combine technical skills with domain knowledge can be trained by universities. Frameworks like MINNs and PINNs, which demand that models remain true to reality, are available for developers to use. Additionally, we as users, voters, and citizens have the power to insist that AI support science and objective truth rather than merely correlations.”

“After teaching scientific modelling and statistics at the university level for over ten years, I now concentrate on teaching students how algorithms function under the hood by learning the systems themselves rather than memorising them. Raising literacy in the related fields of science, math, and coding is the aim,” Erik added.

Today, this method is required. More people clicking “generate” on black-box models is not necessary. There is a need for people who can decipher the logic, code, and math of the AI and recognise its inaccuracies.

“Artificial intelligence won’t replace people or render education obsolete. However, if we lose the ability to think for ourselves and understand the importance of science and in-depth knowledge, we may replace ourselves. The decision is not about accepting or rejecting AI. It’s whether we’ll continue to be knowledgeable and astute enough to steer it,” Erik noted.

Meanwhile, the introduction of a Product Support Agent and the general release of Data Insights Agent are two recent developments in Adobe’s agentic AI tools. Enhancing troubleshooting and insight generation in Adobe Experience Platform applications is the goal of these tools. Marketers and customer experience specialists now have an interactive way to identify and fix problems in their marketing workflows thanks to the recently created Product Support Agent AI assistant.

Operational bottlenecks that frequently divert teams from strategic initiatives are addressed by the tool, according to the company. The agent helps by offering real-time direction, making it easier to create support cases, and allowing continuous case management through the AI assistant conversational interface.

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In a recent message to employees and investors, Sutskever confirmed that Gross formally left SSI on June 29.

Sutskever remarked, “We appreciate his early contributions to the company and wish him well in his next endeavour.”

For his part, Daniel Gross expressed hope for the company’s future. In April, SSI’s most recent valuation was an astounding USD 32 billion.

“The company has a very bright future, and I expect miracles to follow,” he wrote in an X post.

The Mark Zuckerberg-led company reportedly offers some AI researchers signing bonuses of up to USD 100 million as part of a massive hiring spree to revamp its AI strategy, which coincides with his move to Meta.

According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg has personally led the recruitment effort for the “Superintelligence Team.”

He has invited leading AI researchers and engineers from other companies to meet with him at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe to discuss offers to join Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg’s aim is for Meta to be the first company to achieve superintelligence, which it can then use to power its products, like its AI chatbot and AI smart glasses.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a new division that will be co-led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang. Talent was sourced from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI for the team. Meta is also offering up to a nine-figure pay for researchers on its “Superintelligence Team.”

Friedman, Daniel Gross’ investment partner at NFDG, a venture capital firm, has also supported SSI in the past. Sutskever, OpenAI alumnus Daniel Levy, and Gross co-founded SSI.

According to reports, Gross’s new position at Meta will involve working on A.Me. items for MSL.

Life And Career Of Ilya Sutskever

Ilya Sutskever, one of the most prominent figures in artificial intelligence and a co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. His family first relocated to Israel when he was five years old, and then, when he was a teenager, to Canada.

Having been captivated by math and computers since childhood, he studied computer science at the University of Toronto for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees before completing his doctorate under deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton. The foundation for numerous significant developments in AI was established by his doctoral work, especially the creation of deep neural networks.

His career took off when Sutskever co-authored the ground-breaking AlexNet paper in 2012, which won the ImageNet competition and set off the current AI boom. He joined Google Brain after working with Andrew Ng as a postdoc at Stanford, where he helped create the Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) model for machine translation, which was another significant advancement in neural network research. Additionally, he helped shape large-scale AI infrastructure and contributed to the initial iterations of TensorFlow.

Sutskever co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and was its Chief Scientist. He helped create the GPT models at OpenAI and went on to lead the Superalignment team, which addressed the crucial problem of bringing superintelligent AI into line with human values.

Sutskever’s departure in 2024, however, was the result of internal conflicts at OpenAI, especially those concerning safety and governance, and the high-profile boardroom scandal that resulted in the temporary removal of CEO Sam Altman.

Sutskever, Daniel Levy, and Daniel Gross founded Safe Superintelligence shortly after departing OpenAI. SSI was established with the sole goal of creating a superintelligence that is safe, aligned, and unaffected by commercial distractions.

With offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, the business has emerged as a key player in the conversation about AI safety. In July 2025, Sutskever assumed the role of CEO after Gross left to join Meta, continuing his long-standing dedication to creating AI that advances humanity transparently and safely.

Image Credits: Ilya Sutskever LinkedIn

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If someone goes through the list of legendary tech industry bosses (for example), it contains names like Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, who were college dropouts. Now the temptation will be there to follow a similar path and choose business over studies. However, this article will show its readers ways to pursue their entrepreneurial traits, while continuing their education.

Also, don’t forget that universities often offer an abundance of resources to students, including start-up competitions, advisors, and tech labs. And these resources are more than enough to help students with entrepreneurial traits to pursue their dreams.

And this article will further shed light upon the above fact.

Start Making Contacts

Evaluate the college/university environment, study the kinds of people who go there, and then, start connecting with them. See if they are passionate about being entrepreneurs and what their interest areas are. If they pass your vibe check, connect with them.

A very good case study here is the formation of Facebook in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg, along with his friends Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes started the digital platform to connect people around Harvard University. Then it got a good craze among the collegegoers in the Boston area and in no time, made the concept of “Social Media” a mainstream one.

Also, Along with entrepreneurial traits, you need leadership and decision-making abilities. Expose yourself to new opportunities like extracurricular activities on campus and internships. The relationships you establish in the process will enable you to start the process of creating your own inner “Business Network,” which will be a handful as you progress professionally.

Attend Business/Entrepreneurship Classes

“Taking entrepreneurship classes is like building up your muscles for the big fight,” said Mike Kyriacou, a lecturer at UC Berkeley who teaches a topic called “Venture Applications of Data Science.”

“Classes are a risk-free environment where you can try out experiments — and that will help students to be more prepared when they venture out into the real world,” Kyriacou told CNBC.

Since in the first two points we have emphasised building connections (be it with classmates or professors), these business/entrepreneurship classes also present opportunities to level up the connection game further.

“They’re going to be execs here or there so you’re building relationships with each other and you all become great dots to connect with each other in the future,” Kyriacou said.

Pedro Pachuca, who studied electrical engineering, computer sciences and business administration at UC Berkeley, is also known as the co-founder of SportVue, a start-up aimed at revolutionising the way athletes train. Pachuca started the company during his freshman year with his friend and roommate, James Li.

Talking about the utility of attending business/entrepreneurship classes, Pachuca told CNBC back in 2020, “In business classes, professors try to codify intuition and then teach it to other people, which works to an extent, but it’s hard for students to pick up on intuition. I think business school really gives you a lot of good frameworks to think about. For example, they gave us frameworks on how to categorise customers which I think I’ve used a lot.”

Chris Cherian, the CEO of Gatherly, a start-up aimed at transforming how online events are held, said that the technical financial modelling skills he learnt from classes have been extremely helpful for him in real-world scenarios.

Draft Business Idea

Being observant and a problem-finder should be the way for students looking to be business founders. Pay attention to problems you or someone else has been facing daily, problems which can be sorted out through some expertise that you possess. Remember, necessity is the mother of invention.

For example, Cherian and his Gatherly team realised the need for a better way of hosting large events online when they attended a conference, where “it felt like you were in a large room with 300 people all in a giant circle.”

Talking about finding business ideas, Pachuca remarked, “One guy just not too long ago was travelling with a suitcase and thought ‘Dang my luggage is really heavy.’ So what did he do? He slapped the wheels on the luggage. Suitcases had existed before this for many years, and wheels had existed before this for many more years, but no one had thought to put them together until he did. And this is because everyone had this pain point but just said ‘This Sucks,’ but no one did anything about it until he thought of solving it. And that made him a lot of money because he solved a problem for a lot of people.”

Give Shape to Your Idea

Find the customer base that will benefit from your product, and check whether your solution is unique/first-of-a-kind in the market or not. Research further to find out whether any other venture is already working on a similar concept. If that’s the case, explore the ways you can refine your products and make them stand out from the rest. Also, take into consideration factors like cost friendliness.

Rigorously test your products (in a prototype manner, while emulating various operational scenarios), to make sure that the solution helps your potential customers perfectly. Conduct “Customer Discovery Interviews” to understand exactly what kind of products your potential customers are expecting.

Make an MVP (minimum viable product) which will serve as the baseline of the ultimate product that you will launch in the market. The idea behind MVP is the smart utilisation of efforts and money at an economic scale. Hold “Prototype Interviews,” where you show off your MVP to users to showcase that your product is actually solving their problems. Speak with your potential customers again and again to make sure that you are not wasting your time building features that users don’t want.

Sharpen the Business Plan Further

A student entrepreneur’s business comes under the start-up category, where it needs to go through stages like marketing, raising investments, experimenting with revenue, expanding the team, and many other options. To make things easier, hiring a “Business Mentor” is not a bad option, as he /she will help you and your team to guide you through the initial push and pull forces of the market.

Prepare a vision document that will contain a basic description of your business, along with an in-depth look at your venture’s uniqueness, target audience, its immediate and long-term goals and the strategies to achieve them.

The document should also present a detailed outlook of the industry vertical where your business is serving, the overall competition within the sector and how your product is different from those of rivals.

Also mention the profiles of your team members (including their roles in the business), and your financial numbers, including a projected cash flow, profit and loss, break-even analysis, and outline of the funding required from investors. Also inculcate documents like industry studies, trademark registrations, and letters of incorporation.

Build Your Credit

According to a study of millennial small business owners by Wells Fargo, 14% of the surveyed individuals started their businesses by using a personal credit card instead of taking out a loan.

“Because of their young age, size of their businesses, and annual revenue, many, unfortunately, do not qualify for the same kind of financial assistance given to established business owners. College students and graduates alike who may be funding their start-ups on personal credit need to make sure they establish strong credit early on by never missing monthly payments and by paying off debt,” states AllBusiness.

Ensure that your business plan includes a financing request required from investors interested in your business. Learn and practice the art of pitching people with your business ideas while you are in college/university. Many universities hold pitching competitions for start-ups where students can deliver presentations in front of a panel of judges and audiences, who then vote on pitches they like the best as well as critique them.

The post Want to start a business as a college student? Here are the tips appeared first on International Finance.

Since Twitter’s leadership overhaul in October 2022, a lot of water has flown, not towards a positive direction though. Take the rebranding exercise for example. While the micro-blogging platform got renamed as ‘X’ and the logo change reflected on the Apple App Store before July 31, media strategist Eric Seufert found out that the social media platform’s ranking on the Apple App Store’s “Top Downloaded” chart from July 27 to August 15 showing what the ‘X’ leadership didn’t anticipate, a downfall in the average app ranking.

“My hypothesis is that, while the terminally online are entirely aware of Twitter’s rebrand to X, most consumers aren’t, and their searches for ‘Twitter’ on platform stores surface ads and genuine search results that are in no way redolent of Twitter,” Seufert explained the phenomenon.

Yes, Twitter’s rebranding has likely caused confusion among its users, with a search for “Twitter” on the App Store now offering up ‘X’ as the first result, and “the bold, black listing is practically unrecognisable as the new evolution of Twitter,” as per the words of MashableIndia.

More embarrassment

As per Elon Musk’s latest statement, X’s block feature is now on the chopping block.

“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs,” Musk stated on ‘X’, as for the tech billionaire, “it makes no sense.”

It is to be noted that the ‘block’ feature is used to protect ‘X’ users from online trolling, harassment and threats. If one goes through the community guidelines framed by Apple and Google app stores, both tech giants have made it mandatory for social networking apps to include a block feature.

Also as per the data collected by third-party researcher Travis Brown, Musk has over 153 million ‘X’ followers but most of these ‘followers’ are fake and the count is being bloated by millions of new, inactive accounts.

Of the 153,209,283 X accounts following Musk, around 42% of his followers, or over 65.3 million users, have zero followers on their own accounts.

The average number of followers for all 153 million accounts following Elon Musk is just around 187, Brown’s data stated further, while only 453,000 Musk followers or 0.3% have subscribed to ‘X Premium.’

Over 72%, or nearly 112 million, of these users, following Musk, have less than 10 followers on their account, the data revealed further.

The Tesla CEO recently claimed that X now has over 540 million “monthly users”. However, the above finding may now present a huge question mark over this statement.

Meanwhile, ‘X’ has fixed the bug that prevented the platform from displaying images tweeted before 2014.

“Over the weekend (August 19 and 20) we had a bug that prevented us from displaying images from before 2014. No images or data were lost. We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days,” the company stated.

‘X’ users complained about their tweets published prior to December 2014 disappearing. Legendary American television personality Ellen DeGeneres stated on the micro-blogging platform that her famous 2014 Academy Awards ceremony selfie with celebrities like Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence also went missing from her tweet.

X is suing its way out of accountability?

In July 2023, Bloomberg reported about X losing advertisers, partly due to its lax enforcement against hate speech. The report carried inputs from Callum Hood, the head of research at the non-profit organisation called ‘Centre for Countering Digital Hate’. CCDH has been highlighting instances in which the micro-blogging platform has allowed violent, hateful, or misleading content to remain on its portal.

How did X reacted to this? It informed the media about filing a lawsuit against CCDH and the European Climate Foundation. The charge? ‘Misuse’ of X data leading to the loss of the latter’s advertising revenue. X also alleged that the data used for the CCDH research was obtained using the login credentials from the European Climate Foundation, which had an account with the third-party social listening tool Brandwatch.

“Brandwatch has a licence to use Twitter’s data through its API. X alleges that the CCDH was not authorised to access the Twitter/X data. The suit also accuses the CCDH of scraping Twitter’s platform without proper authorisation, in violation of the company’s terms of service,” stated a WIRED article.

“The Centre for Countering Digital Hate’s research shows that hate and disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the platform under Musk’s ownership, and this lawsuit is a direct attempt to silence those efforts,” remarked CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed.

In December 2022, Elon Musk claimed that the hate speech on Twitter was down by a third, contrary to the claims of many of the former employees that the social media company was not doing enough to counter hate speech and misinformation.

When BBC did its investigation into Musk’s claims of hate speeches going down on X, they found out that banned accounts of polarising characters like Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, and Liz Crokin, one of the biggest propagators of the QAnon conspiracy theory, have been reinstated.

“Other lesser-known Twitter users have taken advantage of the new ownership. One account with a racial slur in its user name was able to get a blue checkmark. Another one was purchased by a neo-Nazi who tweets videos of himself reciting Mein Kampf – Hitler’s autobiography,” the report stated further.

“Our own reporting also provides some clues. The BBC analysed over 1,100 previously banned Twitter accounts that were reinstated under Mr Musk. A third appeared to violate Twitter’s own guidelines. [Violent] content was also a scourge on Twitter for years before Mr Musk acquired the platform,” it remarked.

In July 2023, X reinstated American rapper Kanye West after an almost eight-month ban for a series of offencive tweets, including the one showing a symbol combining a swastika and the Star of David.

X Corp lawyer Alex Spiro rejected CCDH’s allegations of Twitter “failing to act on 99%” of hateful messages from accounts with Twitter Blue subscriptions. He also criticised the organisation’s methodology, writing that “the article is little more than a series of inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims based on a cursory review of random tweets.”

Sprio didn’t stop there, as he alleged further that CCDH was supported by funding from “X Corp’s commercial competitors, as well as government entities and their affiliates”, thus accusing the non-profit of attempting to drive away advertisers. But, CCDH refused all these charges.

Experts told that the legal action was the latest move by social media platforms to shrink access to their data by researchers and civil society organisations.

“We’re talking about access not just for researchers or academics, but it could also potentially be extended to advocates and journalists and even policymakers,” says Liz Woolery, digital policy lead at PEN America, a non-profit that advocates for free expression.

“Without that kind of access, it is really difficult for us to engage in the research necessary to better understand the scope and scale of the problem that we face, of how social media is affecting our daily life, and make it better,” she stated further.

Twitter following Meta example

In 2021, Meta blocked researchers at New York University’s Ad Observatory from collecting data about political ads and COVID-19 misinformation. In 2022, the Mark Zuckerberg-led social media giant company announced winding down its monitoring tool CrowdTangle, which has been instrumental in allowing researchers and journalists to monitor Facebook.

Meta and X rivalries went to that extent a month back, when Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg challenged each other in a cage fight. However, the reality is that both ventures are suing Israeli data collection firm Bright Data, for scraping their sites to collect data. Meta itself contracted the same company to scrape the data of the social media company’s rivals.

“Musk announced in March that the company would begin charging USD 42,000 per month for its API, pricing out the vast majority of researchers and academics who have used it to study issues like disinformation and hate speech in more than 17,000 academic studies,” stated the article.

Social media platforms vs researchers

“For years, advocacy organisations have used examples of violative content on social platforms as a way to pressure advertisers to withdraw their support, forcing companies to address problems or change their policies. Without the underlying research into hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful content on social media, these organisations would have little ability to force companies to change,” WIRED noted.

In 2020, advertisers, including Starbucks, Patagonia, and Honda, left Facebook over the social media company’s lax approach against misinformation, particularly posts by former United States president Donald Trump.

After taking over Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk fired many of the staffers responsible for keeping the micro-blogging platform safe from hate speeches and misinformation. The tech billionaire also reinstated the accounts of banned users like Trump and influencer Andrew Tate, currently indicted under human trafficking laws in Romania.

The University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, along with Oregon State University, UCLA, and University of California Merced, released a study in 2023, which found that hate speech increased dramatically after Musk took over Twitter’s reigns. Also, the company saw its advertising revenue slashed in half as brands got concerned about their products appearing next to misinformation and hate speech.

The study got vindicated as in November 2022, Elon Musk tweeted, “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Woolery worried that the cost of fighting the lawsuits may intimidate research bodies and non-profits doing the work of exposing hate speeches and misinformation in the domain of social media.

“Lawsuits like this, especially when we are talking about a non-profit, are definitely seen as an attempt to silence critics. If a non-profit or another individual is not in a financial position where they can really, truly give it all it takes to defend themselves, then they run the risk of either having a poor defence or of simply settling and just trying to get out of it to avoid incurring further costs and reputational damage,” she stated further.

A tough road ahead?

“But the lawsuit doesn’t just put pressure on researchers themselves. It also highlights another avenue through which it now may be more difficult for advocates to access data: third-party social listening platforms. These companies access and analyse data from social platforms to allow their clients—from national security contractors to marketing agencies—to gain insights into their audiences and target messages,” stated the WIRED
article.

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director of CyberWell, a non-profit tracking anti-Semitism online in both English and Arabic, stated that in November 2022, his company reached out to Talkwalker, a third-party social listening company, to get a subscription that would allow them to analyse anti-Semitic speech on the then Twitter.

Montemayor told that Talkwalker informed her that the company could not take the non-profit on as a client because of the nature of CyberWell’s work. Montemayor also suspected that “the existing open source tools and social listening tools are being reserved and paywalled only for advertisers and paid researchers. Non-profit organisations are actively being blocked from using these resources.”

“Talkwalker did not respond to a request for comment about whether its agreements with X prohibit it from taking on organisations doing hate speech monitoring as clients. X did not respond to questions about what parameters it sets for the kinds of customers that third-party social listening companies can take on,” the article pointed out.

X’s lawsuit against CCDH also cited a 2023 agreement between Brandwatch and X that outlined that any breach of the micro-blogging platform’s data via Brandwatch’s customers would be considered the responsibility of the social listening company.

Yoel Roth, X’s former senior director of trust and safety at Twitter, stated on BlueSky, “Brandwatch’s social listening business is entirely, completely, 100% dependant on Twitter data access, so I guess it’s not surprising to see how far backwards they’re bending to placate the company.”

A representative from another third-party social listening tool that uses X data, confirmed to WIRED that companies like theirs are heavily reliant on Twitter/X data.

“A lot of the services that are very Twitter-centric, a lot of them are 100% Twitter,” the anonymous source stated.

“In terms of data, Twitter continues to play a significant role in providing data to analytics companies,” the company added further, while noting that X’s new paid-for API has put the squeeze on third-party analytics companies, as losing access to the micro-blogging platform’s data will destroy these research companies.

The source even talked about specific “know your customer” guidelines prohibiting sharing X data with government agencies without prior permission.

After publishing a report on the increasing anti-Semitic content on Twitter since Musk’s takeover, London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), experienced a deluge of abusive tweets, with Musk himself taking potshots at the think-tank with a Tweet carrying poop emoji.

In December 2022, came out ‘Twitter Files’, a declassification of internal documents showing that pre-Musk Twitter had ‘silenced’ conservative users on its platform. Some of these declassified documents even included the names and emails of disinformation researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Some of these individuals have now reportedly become the targets of online hate.

Sasha Havlicek, cofounder and CEO of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), now pins her hopes on the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which will eventually mandate access for researchers to data from large social platforms. And yes, such laws should be made mandatory in other parts of the world.

In light of the numerous challenges discussed, the trajectory of Elon Musk’s leadership and its ultimate outcome remains intriguing. Overcoming the array of obstacles will determine his success in steering the platform forward.

The post X-Man Elon Musk’s Apocalypse appeared first on International Finance.