Zuckerberg repeatedly fell back on accusing Lanier of “mischaracterizing” his previous statements. When it came to emails, Zuckerberg typically objected based on how old the message was, or his lack of familiarity with the Meta employees involved. “I don’t think so, no,” he replied when directed to clarify if he knew Karina Newton, Instagram’s head of public policy in 2021. And Zuckerberg never failed to point out when he wasn’t actually on an email thread entered as evidence.

Perhaps anticipating these detached and repetitive talking points from Zuckerberg—who claimed over and over that any increased engagement from a user on Facebook or Instagram merely reflected the “value” of those apps—Lanier early on suggested that the CEO has been coached to address these issues. “You have extensive media training,” he said. “I think I’m sort of well-known to be pretty bad at this,” Zuckerberg protested, getting a rare laugh from the courtroom. Lanier went on to present Meta documents outlining communication strategies for Zuckerberg, describing his team as “telling you what kind of answers to give,” including in a context such as testifying under oath. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply,” Zuckerberg said. In the afternoon, Meta counsel Paul Schmidt returned to that line of questioning, asking if Zuckerberg had to speak to the media because of his role as head of a major business. “More than I would like,” Zuckerberg said, to more laughter.

In an even more, well, “meta” moment after the court had returned from lunch, Kuhl struck a stern tone by warning all in the room that anyone wearing “glasses that record”—such as the AI-equipped Oakley and Ray-Ban glasses sold by Meta for up to $499—had to remove them while attending the proceedings, where both video and audio recordings are prohibited.

K.G.M.’s suit and the others to follow are novel in their sidestepping of Section 230, a law that has protected tech companies from liability for content created by users on their platforms. As such, Zuckerberg stuck to a playbook that framed the lawsuit as a fundamental misunderstanding of how Meta works. When Lanier presented evidence that Meta teams were working on increasing the minutes users spent on their platforms each day, Zuckerberg countered that the company had long ago moved on from those objectives, or that those numbers were not even “goals” per se, just metrics of competitiveness within the industry. When Lanier questioned if Meta was merely hiding behind an age limit policy that was “unenforced” and maybe “unenforceable,” per an email from Nick Clegg, Meta’s former president of global affairs, Zuckerberg calmly deflected with a narrative about people circumventing their safeguards despite continual improvements on that front.

Lanier, though, could always return to K.G.M., who he said had signed up for Instagram at the age of 9, some five years before the app started asking users for their birthday in 2019. While Zuckerberg could more or less brush off internal data on, say, the need to convert tweens into loyal teen users, or Meta’s apparent rejection of the alarming expert analysis they had commissioned on the risks of Instagram’s “beauty filters,” he didn’t have a prepackaged response to Lanier’s grand finale: a billboard-sized tarp, which took up half the width of the courtroom and required seven people to hold, of hundreds of posts from K.G.M.’s Instagram account. As Zuckerberg blinked hard at the vast display, visible only to himself, Kuhl, and the jury, Lanier said it was a measure of the sheer amount of time K.G.M. had poured into the app. “In a sense, y’all own these pictures,” he added. “I’m not sure that’s accurate,” Zuckerberg replied.

When Lanier had finished and Schmidt was given the chance to set Zuckerberg up for an alternate vision of Meta as a utopia of connection and free expression, the founder quickly gained his stride again. “I wanted people to have a good experience with it,” he said of the company’s platforms. Then, a moment later: “People shift their time naturally according to what they find valuable.”

Bose helped write the book on noise canceling when it entered the market way back in the 1970s. Lately, the brand has been on a tear, with the goal of creating the ultimate in sonic solitude. The QuietComfort Ultra Gen 2 are Bose’s latest and greatest creation, offering among the very best noise canceling we’ve ever tested.

Just as importantly, they’re currently on sale for $50 off. Now, this might not seem like a huge discount on a $450 pair of headphones, but this is the lowest price we’ve seen on these headphones outside of a major shopping holiday. So if you missed your chance during Black Friday but you have a spring break trip to Mexico or Hawaii on the calendar, this is your best bet.

The Best Noise Canceling Headphones Are on Sale

I’ve wondered over the last few years if the best noise cancelers even needed another potency upgrade. Previous efforts like Sony’s WH-1000XM5, Apple’s AirPods Max, and Bose’s own QuietComfort 45 offering enough silence that my own wife gives me a jump scare when she walks up behind me.

Then I had a kid.

Bose’s properly named QuietComfort Ultra not only do a fantastic job quelling the many squeaks, squawks, and adorable pre-nap protests my baby makes. Now that my wife and I have turned my solo office into a shared space, I can go about my business in near total sonic freedom, even as she sits in on a loud Zoom call.

In testing, we found Sony’s latest WH-1000XM6 offered a slight bump in noise canceling performance over Bose’s latest, due in part to their zippy response time when attacking unwanted sounds. But both were within a hair of each other when tested across frequencies. I prefer Bose’s pair for travel, due to their more cushy design that lets me listen for a full cross-country flight in luxe comfort.

Upgrades to the latest generation, like the ability to sleep them and quickly wake them, make these headphones surprisingly more intuitive to use daily. The new built-in USB-C audio interface lets you listen to lossless audio directly from supported devices, a nice touch now that Spotify has joined Apple Music and other services with lossless audio support.

Speaking of audio, the QC Ultra Gen 2’s performance is impressive, providing clear and crisp detail and dialog, with a lively touch that brings some added excitement to instruments like percussion or zippy guitar tones. It’s a lovely overall presentation. I’m not a huge fan of the new spatial audio mode (what Bose calls Cinema mode), but it’s always nice to have options.

These headphones often bounce between full price and this $50 discount, so if you’ve been waiting for the dip, now’s the time to buy. If you’ve deal with daily distractions like me, whether at home or in a busy office space, you’ll appreciate the latest level of sound-smashing solitude Bose’s best noise-cancelers ever can provide.

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Like many Silicon Valley companies today, Scout AI is training large AI models and agents to automate chores. The big difference is that instead of writing code, answering emails, or buying stuff online, Scout AI’s agents are designed to seek and destroy things in the physical world with exploding drones.

In a recent demonstration, held at an undisclosed military base in central California, Scout AI’s technology was put in charge of a self-driving off-road vehicle and a pair of lethal drones. The agents used these systems to find a truck hiding in the area, and then blew it to bits using an explosive charge.

“We need to bring next-generation AI to the military,” Colby Adcock, Scout AI’s CEO, told me in a recent interview. (Adcock’s brother, Brett Adcock, is the CEO of Figure AI, a startup working on humanoid robots). “We take a hyperscaler foundation model and we train it to go from being a generalized chatbot or agentic assistant to being a warfighter.”

Adcock’s company is part of a new generation of startups racing to adapt technology from big AI labs for the battlefield. Many policymakers believe that harnessing AI will be the key to future military dominance. The combat potential of AI is one reason why the US government has sought to limit the sale of advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment to China, although the Trump administration recently chose to loosen those controls.

“It’s good for defense tech startups to push the envelope with AI integration,” says Michael Horowitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who previously served in the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and emerging capabilities. “That’s exactly what they should be doing if the US is going to lead in military adoption of AI.”

Horowitz also notes, though, that harnessing the latest AI advances can prove particularly difficult in practice.

Large language models are inherently unpredictable and AI agents—like the ones that control the popular AI assistant OpenClaw—can misbehave when given even relatively benign tasks like ordering goods online. Horowitz says it may be especially hard to demonstrate that such systems are robust from a cybersecurity standpoint—something that would be required for widespread military use.

Scout AI’s recent demo involved several steps where AI had free rein over combat systems.

At the outset of the mission the following command was fed into a Scout AI system known as Fury Orchestrator:

Fury Orchestrator, send 1 ground vehicle to checkpoint ALPHA. Execute a 2 drone kinetic strike mission. Destroy the blue truck 500m East of the airfield and send confirmation.

A relatively large AI model with over a 100 billion parameters, which can run either on a secure cloud platform or an air-gapped computer on-site, interprets the initial command. Scout AI uses an undisclosed open source model with its restrictions removed. This model then acts as an agent, issuing commands to smaller, 10-billion-parameter models running on the ground vehicles and the drones involved in the exercise. The smaller models also act as agents themselves, issuing their own commands to lower-level AI systems that control the vehicles’ movements.

Seconds after receiving marching orders, the ground vehicle zipped off along a dirt road that winds between brush and trees. A few minutes later, the vehicle came to a stop and dispatched the pair of drones, which flew into the area where it had been instructed that the target was waiting. After spotting the truck, an AI agent running on one of the drones issued an order to fly toward it and detonate an explosive charge just before impact.