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Meta is Quietly Launching Pocket, an App for Vibe-coding and Scrolling Small 'Gizmos'

Slashdot
5 days 23 hours ago
"Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch," writes The Verge. While it's not available for downloads in most locations, Meta's Pocket will allow people "to generate small, interactive apps and games using AI prompts," writes TechCrunch. They're called "gizmos", and Pocket "also offers a scrollable feed where you can play with gizmos others have made." Some context from The Verge: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media, and he's previously described a vision of how users could use AI to make interactive experiences and share them with people. The launch of Pocket appears to be one manifestation of that idea... It follows Meta hiring engineers from a company called Atma Sciences Inc., which made an app called Gizmo, as Business Insider reported in March. On a help center page, Meta also describes a gizmo as a "playable AI-generated experience," and when you post one, Meta says you can choose to let other people remix them. "Based on the app's screenshots in Google Play, there are many similarities to Gizmo's original app, which is still listed," notes TechCrunch. "Pocket is another example of Meta's push to make AI creation tools more mainstream, extending its earlier efforts, which included AI-generated images created via its Meta AI app and AI videos created with its app called Vibes. It has also added AI features across its social platforms... " Given that Meta has not officially announced Pocket's debut, it's likely that Pocket is still in its initial experimentation phase. Its counterpart Gizmo, however, had generated 635,000 lifetime installs across both iOS and Google Play, according to Appfigures, which noted it had a 98% positive sentiment.

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EditorDavid

Big Companies That Invest Heavily in AI Also Hire More People, Report Suggests

Slashdot
6 days ago
"Companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in the entry-level roles that many fear are doomed," writes TechCrunch. That's the conclusion of new report tracking AI spending from Ramp's corporate card/bill pay data as well as Revelio Labs' workforce records from 21,599 U.S. firms: According to the report, "high-intensity adopters" — firms that spend on average $30 per employee per month on AI in the first three months — saw headcount increase 10.2%. Headcount also rose across functions, including engineering, sales, administration, customer service, finance, marketing, and scientist roles. The strongest job growth among high-intensity adopters was in the information sector, which includes software, internet, media, and tech-adjacent firms. Despite these positive signals, the data isn't as rosy as it seems. It skews heavily toward tech-forward, knowledge-work firms — ones that might have VC-backing and are growing fast anyway, making it difficult to say whether AI is contributing to the hiring or just showing up at companies that are expanding anyway. "This paper does not show that AI universally creates jobs," the paper's authors admit, "but it does counter claims that AI will lead to broad job losses." It also counters claims that AI is killing all junior jobs. Recent research from Goldman Sachs found that AI has already erased about 16,000 net jobs per month over the past year, with Gen Z and entry-level workers taking the brunt of the burden. But in tech-forward firms, the report finds that entry-level headcount actually rose by 12%... "For software and technology firms, AI can make core output cheaper or faster to produce: writing code, debugging, building internal tools, producing technical documentation, and supporting product development," the report reads. "Lower production costs in these workflows can raise the return to expanding the whole firm, not just the engineering team." But companies that buy subscriptions and run pilots, yet did not go on to make sustained investments, don't tend to see any gains in headcount, per the report. That sets up the potential for a widening gap between firms that have the resources — like capital, technical staff, founder networks, and management bandwidth — to turn AI adoption into actual business gains and those that are stuck experimenting with subscriptions. In other words, this report suggests that firms that already have the resources are the ones that will see the largest gains. CNBC argues another AI "narrative" was challenged this week: that open source can't make money. "The assumption was that giving your model away for free meant no business. That's breaking too, as open-model companies start posting real revenue and enterprises move from renting AI to running their own."

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EditorDavid