We reported earlier this year on Meta's plans to roll out a facial recognition feature in its smart glasses and the company said it was "still thinking through options." Now Wired discovers that the code to do it is already in Meta's AI app: www.wired.com/story/meta-s...
Who's Who of AI
Kashmir Hill
Why they matter
Tracked through public AI activity and peer connections inside the directory.
- AI signals
- 14 past 30d
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- 7 distinct domains
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- Latest signal
- 17h ago
Journalist, currently at The New York Times. I cover privacy, technology, A.I., and the strange times we live in. Named after the Led Zeppelin song. Author of YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US. (Yes, in my head it will always be All Your Face Are Belong To Us)
What they're sharing
Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones wired.com
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes nytimes.com
Artificial Intelligence Floods Court Dockets with Home-Brewed Lawsuits nytimes.com
arxiv.org
nytimes.com
Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out | WIRED wired.com
nytimes.com
IN THE WEIGHTS intheweights.com
nytimes.com
Articles & links
Got this text a couple months. Had to investigate it. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/t...
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Two business school professors gathered data on 10 million Amazon books over five years, tracking a surge in AI-assisted publishing.
- Monthly e-book publishing tripled since ChatGPT's release, rising from around 100,000 in 2022 to more than 300,000 by the end of last year.
- A 70-year-old retired cybersecurity consultant, Bill Johns, has 445 books on Amazon, with AI-generated portraits of himself in a dark suit as cover art.
Read full analysis →
Long ago, Yelp complained that Google was hurting its business by surfacing information from Yelp in Google searches such that people stopped visiting Yelp. (Lawsuit over this ongoing.) With AI mode, the rest of the web is now feeling Yelp's pain: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/t...
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Cloudflare data shows AI-training crawlers hit 52% of crawler requests by June 2026, up from 22% in spring 2025.
- Google still supplies roughly 88% of referral traffic, but is answering more queries in-place via AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Human traffic to the most heavily crawled categories, including software, IT, retail and finance, has fallen as much as 40% in under a year.
Read full analysis →
This is some incredible in-the-room reporting from @elitan.bsky.social and Maureen Farrell on how Meta got its vast, six-square-mile data center cooking in Louisiana www.nytimes.com/2026/07/27/t...
Great profile of Hany Farid who recently left Bay Area for Vermont: "I can’t stand this place anymore... These major tech giants will burn everything to the ground as long as they’re making a profit.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/u...
On AI legal slop: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/u...
More on the proliferation of A.I. books, including a study on the success of A.I.-generated genre fiction: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/b... arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20349
More on the proliferation of A.I. books, including a study on the success of A.I.-generated genre fiction: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/b... arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20349
OpenAI's ill-fated Sora allowed people to make AI-generated videos with other people's likenesses, but those people had to opt in to letting their likenesses being used. Meta is taking a different path, reports @thiccreese.bsky.social: www.wired.com/story/meta-n...
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Meta's new Muse Image tool lets anyone in the Meta AI app @-mention a public Instagram account and pull that user's photos into a generation.
- Instagram accounts are opted in by default; the toggle sits under Sharing and reuse in the app's Settings and activity menu.
- Muse Image was built by Meta's Superintelligence Labs under Alexandr Wang and is rolling out across Instagram and WhatsApp, with Facebook and Messenger to follow.
Read full analysis →
Did not even last a week. The fact that this made it out the door means the privacy department now works in a basement with no computers and a single stapler. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/t...
I did not know of this joke quote Funnily enough, a tool for seeing how you're weighted in the LLMs recently told me that Kashmir Hill is either me or a Himalayan mountain range, so it could indeed be a land of contradictions. Tool: intheweights.com
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Joey Flynn and Thomas Dimson, both former OpenAI employees, built the site, which launched in June 2026.
- The tool queries models including GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini, Grok, and Llama, scoring recognition up to a maximum of 996.
- Appearing in a 1-billion-parameter model like Meta's Llama signals especially high relevance, because smaller models compress knowledge more aggressively.
Read full analysis →
Just as A.I.-generated books are flooding Amazon, vibe-coded apps are flooding the App store, via @kalleyhuang.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/t...
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In Kashmir Hill's orbit
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