Tech Brew Ride Home - Meta’s Refreshed AI Play

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Meta releases its first model in the great AI horserace catchup race. OpenAI is expecting to make as much money from ads as the biggest social media companies. Meta doesn’t want you to see ads encouraging you to join lawsuits against them. And Amazon’s big Starlink competitor is coming as soon as this summer. Meta releases first AI model since Zuckerberg’s spending spree (FT) AI Horserace Thread (@emollick) Anthropic Completes Tender Offer, But Employees Hold Onto Shares (Bloomberg) OpenAI Forecasts Advertising to Hit $102 billion by 2030 (The Information) Scoop: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation (Axios) Amazon’s Starlink competitor Leo gets a new date (The Verge) Deere settles US right-to-repair lawsuit with $99 million fund, repair commitments (Reuters) Gen Z Is Using A.I., but Doesn’t Feel Great About It (NYTimes) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.orgMS slash college PC. Welcome to the TechBrewrite home for Thursday, April 9th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. META releases its first model in the great AI horse race catch-up race. OpenAI is expecting to make as much money from ads as the biggest social media companies. Meta doesn't want you to see ads encouraging you to join lawsuits against them.

And Amazon's big Starlink competitor is coming as soon as this summer. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, they're trying to stay in the race here. Meta has released Muse Spark, the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs under the direction of Alexander Wang, to quote, power a smarter and faster meta AI across all of Meta's products, quoting the FTE. Mark Zuckerberg signaled earlier this year that the release of these initial AI models would not yet match the most advanced systems from rivals, but the company said Muse Spark would power a smarter and faster version of meta AI, its virtual assistant. It added that

the model would enable more personalized and visual responses drawing on content shared across Instagram, Facebook, and threads. Expect richer more visual results with reels, photos, and posts woven directly into your answers with credit back to the content creators, Meta said. Meta's shares were up 8% on Wednesday following news of the model amid a broader market rally. It also said its new model had strong applications in health care. Meta said it had worked with more than a thousand doctors to train the model to generate more detailed responses on topics such as nutrition and exercise. Using the model, MetaAI will also offer a shopping mode to help users compare prices. Unlike Meta's previous Lama models, which have been

open or freely available for developers to tweak, Muse Spark is a smaller closed model. The company intends to offer a private preview to select partners. Meta said it hoped to open source future versions. The release offers an early indication of how Mark Zuckerberg plans to incorporate meta social media content into its chatbot as part of his promise to develop what he calls personal superintelligence. Mews Spark beat leading models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic and select benchmarks on reasoning and multimodal capabilities, according to evaluations shared by meta. But it acknowledged that the model was not yet cutting edge in certain areas, adding, we continue to invest in areas with current performance gaps, specifically Long Horizon

Agentic Systems and coding workflows. Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that meta planned to release increasingly advanced models that push the frontier of intelligence and capabilities, including new open source models. We are building products that don't just answer your questions, but act as agents that do things for you, he added in a post on threads. With Muse Spark meta appears to lean into niche capabilities such as health, arguing that it is one of the top reasons people turn to AI. Rival OpenAI in January launched ChatGPT Health, a specialized feature that allows users to connect their medical records and fitness apps to its AI to get personalized health advice. Meta has also been working to improve the model's multimodal perception,

such as recognizing objects and photos. Zuckerberg last year said Meta was doubling down on its investment in AI glasses, arguing wearable devices are vital to his bet on superintelligence. When MetaI, powered by Muse Spark comes to our AI glasses, the assistant will be able to better see and understand the world around you, the company said, end quote. Meta also said they are opening a private API preview for Muse Spark to select partners. I think I mentioned that and planned to offer paid API access to a wider audience later. Meanwhile, I found this from Ethan Mollock on X interesting in terms of where we are right now in the broader AI horse race, quoting a Twitter thread from Mollick.

So now we have a pretty good picture of the state of the front. AI model makers. U.S. closed source models continue to lead, Google, opening I, and Anthropics stand well ahead of the pack, and may have signs of recursive self-improvement. XAI has fallen from frontier status for now, though promises to return shortly. Meta re-entered the space today with a not-quite frontier closed-source model, but an approach that suggests that they might be back in the race. All the other U.S. players seem far behind. On the Chinese model front, Alibaba with Quinn, Moonshot with Kimmy, Minimax, Z, Mim, Deep Seek and Z, GLM, all still appear to be very much in the race,

though the best Chinese models are still seven to nine months behind released U.S. closed source models. For some of these players, especially Zalmi and Alibaba, their commitment to open weights appear to be slipping. Lots of questions still remain. Is recursive self-improvement indeed happening at the Big Three Labs? How long can the exponential of LLM ability gain last? How much do Chinese models rely on distillation and can they keep pace given chip constraints?

Will there continue to be frontier open weight models? The U.S. Frontier Labs have all walked away from open weights. They continue to occasionally release excellent open models like Gemma 4, etc., but they are smaller models that are not competitive with their closed weight model kin. So all eyes are on Chinese AI labs for open models, end quote. More signs of where investors think Anthropic stands in the AI horse race, quoting Bloomberg. Anthropic employees have sold some equity to investors wrapping up a secondary share sale that started earlier this year, according to people familiar with the matter. But some investors weren't able to pick up as many shares as they planned because of the limited number that employees were willing to sell.

The tender offer took place at the same value as the company's most recent fundraising in February, said the people who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The company was valued at $350 billion in its latest deal, not including the $30 billion it raised. The total value of the share sale, which closed last week, could not be learned, but it fell short of the amount that investors had lined up, which was as much as $6 billion, some of the people said. Current and former employees wanted to hold more of their shares ahead of Anthropics' upcoming initial public offering expected as soon as this year. investors were able to get their full allocation in the deal while others were only able to deploy

some of the capital that they had set aside for the tender offer. The smaller than expected transaction suggests that employees are optimistic about the company's prospects as its annualized revenue climbs, one of the people said. Last month, the company surpassed $19 billion in annualized run rate revenue by April. Anthropic announced it had surpassed $30 billion in run rate revenue, end quote. This is not exactly the same thing as that, but opening A.I. does seem to be experiencing explosive growth in one aspect of their business, quoting the information. Open AI's advertising effort is so new that the company is still working out the kinks in it. That hasn't stopped it from setting ambitious aims for the business, which it expects to become

the largest driver of its revenue by the end of the decade. Open AI expects advertising to generate about $2.4 billion in revenue this year and to quadruple next year to nearly $11 billion, according to financial forecasts from the first quarter. A year ago, the company forecast it would generate $1.6 billion in revenue this year and $5.9 billion next year from users who didn't pay for subscriptions, an amount the company likely expected to derive from advertising and e-commerce. In 2030, OpenAI expects ads to generate about $102 billion or 36% of its total revenue for that year. A year ago, it forecast non-paying users would only generate $26.5 billion in sales that year. If it can succeed in hitting ad sales of $102 billion, that figure would be about half of what

meta platforms generated from advertising last year. Advertising sales are likely to increase in part through the growth of Open AI's audience. But forecasts for higher revenue per user suggests it also expects to charge more for ads, show ads to its users more frequently, or both. The chat GPT maker projects the average revenue per user for its ads business to surge to about $12 next year from nearly $3.50 this year, according to the recent forecasts. And by 2030, OpenAI expects ARPU to rise to nearly $60. That's annual revenue per user. That's four times higher than the company's early 2025 forecast for its 2030 average revenue per non-paying user. meta's average revenue per user was about $57 last year.

The forecasts also highlight how dependent OpenAI is on keeping users enthralled with its AI. Weekly active users have topped 920 million, short of its projection of $1 billion by the end of last year. Most people don't pay for chat GPT subscriptions, but the personalized conversations they have with the chatbot represent an intriguing new opportunity for advertisers. It's not clear how many weekly users Anthropic has. Open AI figuring out the ads model will be essential in order to commercialize that ads business, said Tomaz Tungoos, founder of Software Investor Deary Ventures on TITV Wednesday. It's about a $500 billion ad market today. What fraction of that will go to AI? It'll be pretty significant, end quote. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination

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With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit Red Bull.com slash Bright Summer ahead to learn more. See you this summer. Meta has begun removing dozens of Facebook and Instagram ads from lawyers seeking clients. who claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18. Quoting Axios, this comes just two weeks after Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark

California case about social media addiction. Lawyers across the country are now seeking new plaintiffs in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts. It's unclear if any of them are being backed by private equity as the California lawsuit appears to have been. Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan and Morgan and Saka Love Law. Almost all of them ran on both Facebook and Instagram. Some also appeared on Threads and Messenger plus Meta's audience network, which distributes ads to thousands of third-party sites. One such ad read, anxiety, depression, withdrawal, self-harm.

These aren't just teenage phases, their symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway. A few of the ads still remain active, including some that were posted, earlier today, meta appears to be relying on part of its terms of service that say, quote, we can also remove or restrict access to content features, services, or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts to meta, end quote. There is no similar restriction listed in its advertising standards, although those are subject to the overall terms of service, end quote.

In his annual letter, Andy Jassy said Amazon's space internet service Leo will launch in mid-20206 after some delays. Amazon has FCC approval for around 3,236 satellites. Quoting the verge, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, says the company's space internet service, Leo, formerly known as Project Koiper, will launch in mid-20206. I'm going to assume that means proper commercial availability since the company already announced the start of an enterprise preview at the end of 2025 when the service was supposed to originally launch. Unlike SpaceX's Starlink service, Amazon doesn't yet have its own fleet of rockets to regularly send Leo satellites into low Earth orbit. That means hitching rides with a variety of launch partners, including SpaceX, until Jeff Bezos' own reusable new Glenn rocket is fully operational.

Amazon has FCC approval for 3,236 Leo satellites, but has only launched 241 so far, well below its commitment to have half, or 1618, of its constellation deployed by July. As such, Amazon has had to beg FCC chair Brendan Carr for an extension. For comparison, SpaceX's active Starlink constellation currently totals over 10,000 satellites. Whenever the Leo service does finally go live, Jesse says it will be faster than existing services and cost less, with the added benefit of integrating seamlessly with AWS, so that business and governments can move data back and forth for storage analytics and AI. Late as it is, there are many individuals, enterprises, and nations just waiting on an Elon Musk

alternative that can be installed quickly and economically to fill gaps in global data coverage, even if it does mean casting their lot with another problematic billionaire, end quote. Something we've talked about several times in years past, quoting Reuters, U.S. Agriculture Equipment Maker Deer, who I know as John Deere, I guess, on Monday agreed to pay $99 million into a settlement fund for farms and farmers that are part of a class action over costs and access to repairs. The case is part of a broader scrutiny in the U.S. over so-called right-to-repair practices with regulators and plaintiffs arguing that some manufacturers limit competition by controlling access to repair tools and software. The settlement fund covers eligible plaintiffs who paid Deers

authorized dealers for repairs to large agricultural equipment from January 2018, according to a document filed on Monday in the federal court in Chicago, Illinois. And the settlement deer also agreed to make available to farmers for 10 years. The quote, digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis and repair of large agricultural equipment, including tractors, combines, and sugar cane harvesters, the filing showed. Their proposed accord requires a judge's approval. This settlement addresses the issues raised in the 2022 complaint and brings this case to an end with no of wrongdoing, Deere said in a separate statement. Deere also faces a separate lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. A U.S. judge ruled in 2025 that Deer must face that lawsuit which

accused the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs. Deer is blocking farmers from acquiring the tools and information necessary to repair their equipment in a timely and cost-effective manner the FTC had said in a court filing in April. Deer has denied the wrongdoing, end quote. Finally today, not sure what to make of this, but a new study from Galp found that young people have grown less hopeful and more angry about artificial intelligence. A survey of 1,500 people aged 14 to 29 found that hopefulness regarding AI has dropped from 27% to just 18% over the past year, even though 50% of those same folks report using Gen AI daily or weekly, quoting the times.

The results suggest that Americans' animosity toward AI extends to a younger job, generation, one that is currently struggling to find its footing in the workplace. In most of these cases, Gen Ziers have become increasingly skeptical, increasingly negative from a place where, even last year, they weren't particularly positive about it, said Zach Harnaroski, a senior education researcher for Gallup who worked on the survey. He said he had been surprised by how noticeably young people's attitudes had shifted. Many respondents did acknowledge that AI might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said, but they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills.

Young adults in the workforce were especially skeptical. Close to half of those surveyed said the risks of artificial intelligence outweighed its potential benefits in the workplace, an 11-point jump from the previous year. Only 15% said they saw AI as a net benefit, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. I knew about investing, but I really didn't know how to go about it. Meet Corey, a Walthfront client. With Walthfront, it could put money in, and it would automatically

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