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Meta has launched Waddle World, an AI virtual-pet app now available on iOS and Android in the Philippines, with wider availability unconfirmed. Users hatch and care for a pixelated companion in a 16-bit style, feeding it, playing with it and watching its mood change.

The twist is conversation: users talk or type about their day, and the pet — which remembers what they share — turns those conversations into illustrated journal entries. The store listing describes companions with moods such as happiness, hunger, sleepiness and boredom, learning more about the user's routines over time, and specifies users must be at least 18.

Waddle World is one of several experimental consumer AI apps Meta has shipped in recent months, alongside Style Sketch, Pocket and Vibes. Meta has not confirmed any wider release or said whether the app connects to its broader Muse AI companion work.

Meta has quietly released Style Sketch, a free AI fashion app now available on iOS and Android in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. The app was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra on October 28, and Meta did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment or say whether a wider launch is planned.

Style Sketch builds a virtual closet from photos a user has already posted to Instagram, or from items added manually by photo, video or camera-roll upload. It then suggests outfit combinations matched to the user's style, with virtual try-on suggestions.

The launch is part of a run of small standalone AI apps from Meta in recent months, alongside Vibes for AI video, Pocket for making games, and the AI pet app Waddle World. TechCrunch notes that digital-closet rivals such as Alta and tools in Google Photos already exist, so Meta's edge is the Instagram connection rather than the idea itself.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told analysts on the company's third-quarter earnings call on October 29 that few customers are buying through outside AI shopping agents, because the experience is 'still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly.' He did not name Meta's Muse, but the remarks came about a month after Amazon blocked Muse from its online store, saying its access was inconsistent with the terms of use its customers had agreed to.

Jassy also said outside agents were not responsible for Amazon's weaker-than-expected advertising growth in the quarter — the concern behind the question, since an agent that shops without visiting Amazon's pages also skips the ads that are a key profit driver. Meta has signed shopping partners that welcome Muse, including Shopify, Walmart and Best Buy; Amazon has not joined them.

Amazon's own agent is the one Jassy wants used. He said more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the past year, with customer interactions up 570% year over year, and that US customers who shop through it spend 50% more per order than those who do not. Amazon also added more than 100 new Alexa for Shopping capabilities on October 29, ahead of the holiday season.

Meta made Muse, its personal AI agent, available in Singapore on October 28, on iOS, Android and the web at muse.ai. Singapore is Muse's fourth market in 50 days since its September debut in the US and Canada, and its second market outside North America after Japan on October 23.

From the start, Muse links to Gmail, Google Calendar and Instagram, so it can sort email, arrange schedules and draw on saved posts. Meta named eight local partners whose apps Muse will connect to, among them Shopee, Grab, Lazada and Singapore Airlines, plus Agoda, ShopBack, Klook and Trip.com.

Meta's examples include comparing prices before buying on Shopee or Lazada, planning groceries and meals through Grab, and earning cashback through ShopBack. The company says partner features will roll out progressively, with some arriving after launch, without saying which work on day one.

Meta announced on October 28 that it is partnering with five US universities — the California Institute of Technology, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Louisiana State University, Indiana University and UTHealth Houston — granting $2 million across the five schools, alongside access to its Superintelligence models and direct collaboration with Meta researchers. The work spans medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and mathematics.

At Caltech, five faculty members get access to frontier Muse models through Meta's API, with project grants lasting up to three years, including a project testing whether AI systems can generate machine-checkable mathematical proofs against a benchmark of more than 86,900 open research problems. Ohio State researchers are studying whether routine CT scans, medical records and ECG data can flag future heart-failure risk, alongside chest X-ray reporting and Alzheimer's diagnosis support. LSU is building a camera-based system, exploring Meta's open-weight SAM models, to watch infants with tracheostomies for tube displacement and distress; Indiana is studying conversational AI for people with dementia.

Support varies by institution and project, and Meta says patient data in the healthcare projects will remain within institutional environments, with university researchers controlling the research. The model list named across the projects includes Muse Spark Open, the Muse Wonder and Muse Spark series, the 30-billion-parameter open-weight Muse Glimmer, and the SAM, V-JEPA, DINO and SeamlessM4T models.

In a 24-hour comparison published Tuesday, October 27, WIRED's Reece Rogers set up six always-on AI agents on his iPhone — OpenAI's Dots, Anthropic's Claude Duet, Meta's Muse, Google's Gemini Spark, xAI's Grok Bot and Instinct — and gave them five everyday tasks scored from 1 to 5. Only Dots and Claude Duet warned him about a deliberately planted scheduling conflict; the other four missed the overlap before it happened.

Rogers connected his personal Gmail and Google Calendar rather than his whole digital life, and judged the agents on initiative, instruction-following and browser use. The entry costs differed widely in his comparison: Dots at $100 a month, Grok Bot at $30, and Gemini Spark and Claude Duet at $20 each, with Muse free and Instinct invite-only.

The test is a useful early snapshot of the agent race the big labs are now running in public: having access to an inbox and a calendar, it turns out, does not guarantee an agent will connect the dots between them.

Nvidia and Meta announced on Tuesday, October 27, that they will expand their collaboration on Muse and the Muse family of models, to improve training and inference performance and lower costs. Nvidia will invest $3 billion in Meta's equity offering.

Meta intends to expand its deployment of Nvidia infrastructure, including Vera Rubin and Vera CPUs for next-generation AI agents, along with Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and BlueField-4. The companies also said they may explore further work on Nvidia's OpenShell reference architecture for safe agent deployment and its Sentry tool for monitoring agent behavior.

Reuters reported the same morning that Meta had increased its equity offering to $97.5 billion, the largest fundraising in its history, up from the up-to-$95 billion plan announced on Monday. Jensen Huang framed agents as a new computing paradigm in the joint announcement.

Rohit Patel, a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs who worked on reinforcement learning and AI evaluation, has left Meta after eight years to run Ndoc full-time, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday, October 27. Ndoc is a three-person startup with no outside funding, pitched as an AI-native replacement for Microsoft Office and Google Workspace rather than another AI feature bolted onto them.

The product splits work into three tabs: Stage for presentations, dashboards, simulations and mini apps; Narrative for analyses with numbered citations and generated figures; and Model for the underlying datasets and Python scripts, so readers can inspect the code behind a document. Files export as single .ndoc.html documents that open in any browser, and Patel plans to open-source the format.

An enterprise pilot is underway, an alpha is opening to a limited waitlist, a beta is planned in coming weeks and a full launch is set for next year. Patel is one of several senior Meta departures in the same stretch, alongside Joel Kaplan, Andrew Tulloch and Emily Dalton Smith.

Meta said on Monday, October 26, that it plans to raise up to $95 billion in equity, its largest-ever fundraising, to pay for AI data centers and what it calls superintelligence, Reuters reports. The company has launched underwritten public offerings worth about $35 billion in common and preferred stock, and plans a separate at-the-market program worth up to $60 billion once its new non-voting Class C shares begin trading, expected in the first quarter of 2027, though timing and terms for that second program are not final.

The first tranche splits into about $12.5 billion of depositary shares representing mandatory convertible preferred stock and about $22.5 billion of Class A common stock offered through forward sale structures. At Friday's $642.62 close, selling the full $95 billion would mean roughly 148 million new shares, about 5.8 percent dilution — in a new share class that carries no votes, leaving Mark Zuckerberg's entities with about 56.1 percent of the voting power. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom have shown interest in up to $5 billion in total for Class A shares, which Reuters notes adds to concerns about circular capital flows, with chip suppliers financing one of their biggest customers.

The raise reverses Meta's usual direction of travel: it bought back $26.3 billion of stock in the first nine months of 2025 and none in the same stretch of 2026, borrowed $24.9 billion this year, and posted negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion in the third quarter, against capital spending guidance of $135 billion to $145 billion for 2026. Meta's shares fell about 1.4 percent in morning trading. The company said the money supports momentum across its core business and AI opportunities, including Muse, which passed 10 million accounts in its first weeks.

Meta's personal AI agent Muse launched in Japan on October 23, its first market outside North America since its September debut in the US and Canada. Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, said the agent was available to download from app stores on the day, weeks after Meta's Japanese launch page had said local availability was still undecided.

Muse is available in Japan on iOS, Android and the muse.ai website, with many basic functions free and subscription plans for heavier use, though the Japan announcement does not specify local prices or free-tier limits. The agent moves beyond answering questions to carrying out tasks such as sending emails and booking travel through services users connect.

The expansion follows a fast North American start: Meta said on its October 21 earnings call that more than 10 million people in the US and Canada had set up Muse in its first six weeks. Japan is the first test of whether that uptake travels, and of how Muse handles language, local services and pricing outside its home market.

Meta has acquired Sundial, an AI-powered data analytics platform, a company spokesperson confirmed to Axios on Friday. No price was disclosed. Sundial, founded in 2021, turns natural-language questions into data analysis through a chatbot plug-in, so teams can query company data themselves instead of routing every request through a central analytics team.

It is a homecoming: co-founders Julie Zhuo, Meta's former vice president of product design, and Chandra Narayanan, formerly analytics chief at Instagram and Sequoia Capital, are rejoining Meta with their team. Sundial raised $23 million in total, including a $16 million Series A in July 2025 led by DJ Patil's GPV with Sequoia backing — and its customer list included OpenAI.

Sundial folds into DATA, Meta's new Data Analytics Tooling & Agents unit, led by Alex Schultz, whom Meta named its first chief data officer in July. Narayanan will lead the analytics tooling and agents work. 'AI has created effectively unlimited demand for insights, and we want to define the future of AI analytics,' Schultz wrote. Sundial will stop serving outside customers when the deal closes; what happens to its existing customer relationships, OpenAI's included, is not yet clear.

Goldman Sachs announced on Thursday a $500 million commitment to expand its 10,000 Small Businesses program, headlined by a new Goldman Sachs Small Business AI Institute. The institute is partnering with Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI to give entrepreneurs training and tools to integrate AI into their operations.

The institute will work on three fronts: delivering AI education to small-business owners across the country, publishing research on AI use by small businesses, and supporting AI-enabled expansions of access to capital. The wider commitment aims to deliver education, capital access and support services to another 10,000 businesses.

Nearly 20,000 entrepreneurs across all 50 states and four US territories have completed the program since it launched in 2010. 'Every major technology shift has rewarded the businesses that adapt most quickly,' CEO David Solomon said. 'This commitment makes sure the entrepreneurs who are creating America's jobs can lead in the AI economy.'

Walmart announced on Wednesday that it is embracing agentic commerce, launching an Agent Gateway and related controls for customers who shop through AI agents. The move is the opposite of its biggest rival's: Amazon has recently begun blocking outside AI agents from making purchases on shoppers' behalf.

The Agent Gateway is Walmart's own MCP server — the Model Context Protocol was originally created by Anthropic — letting approved agents search Walmart and Sam's Club inventory and buy on a customer's behalf, without the customer having to hand the agent their personal information or purchase history. Walmart already offers integrations with Meta's Muse, ChatGPT, Gemini and other popular AI apps.

Agent Profiles, rolling out next month, give each agent a dedicated profile inside a customer's Walmart account, likened to adding an authorized user to a credit card. Customers can require approval for every purchase or set a spending limit, can delete a profile at any time, and do not need a Walmart+ membership. Walmart is also publishing terms for agents: they cannot exceed what the shopper intends, cannot access payment information, and non-compliant agents will be blocked — while Walmart's returns process still applies when an agent buys the wrong thing.

A New Mexico judge on Wednesday set Meta's civil penalty at $25 billion in the state's Cambridge Analytica-era privacy case, converting September's jury verdict into a dollar figure. The Santa Fe jury had found 43.9 million willful violations of the state Unfair Practices Act across 34 public statements about data privacy, hate speech and misinformation; at the $5,000 statutory maximum per violation, exposure ran to roughly $219.5 billion.

The state had asked the judge to apply the full rate and then trim the total to $35-40 billion, while Meta argued anything above about $3.45 billion would breach excessive-fines protections. The judge kept the top per-violation rate, calling the misstatements intentional, systematic and repeated over more than a decade, but used the court's discretion to cut the award to $25 billion. Interest accrues at 15% a year until it is paid, and under New Mexico law the penalties fund education spending.

Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company will appeal, calling the ruling a tax on speech that makes it all but impossible to do business in the state. Attorney General Raul Torrez, who sued in 2021, said the case is about whether companies can mislead consumers about their personal information without meaningful consequences. Barron's noted the timing: the penalty lands just as Meta asks users to trust its Muse agent with personal information from emails to bank statements.

Meta reported third-quarter results on Wednesday and put its Muse AI agent at the center of the story. More than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Muse accounts since the agent launched on September 8, about 25% of them use the app daily, and shopping is the most popular use case, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts. He said he expects Muse to eventually serve billions of people and that Meta is deliberately not charging up front in order to build a Muse network first.

The quarter itself beat on the top line: revenue rose 26% to $64.6 billion, ahead of the roughly $63.4 billion expected, and Meta forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $73 billion to $76 billion. Net income was $9.86 billion and earnings per share $3.83, well below expectations, after a $9.89 billion charge tied to the August multi-state settlement; without it, EPS would have been $7.40. Free cash flow turned negative at -$2.12 billion, versus +$10.63 billion a year earlier.

To fund the build-out without diluting Zuckerberg's control, Meta will create a new class of non-voting Class C shares in January 2027, effectively a two-for-one split, usable for acquisitions and talent. It also raised the low end of its 2026 capital-spending forecast from $130 billion to $135 billion, keeping the top end at $145 billion. Shares rose more than 4% in extended trading.