Meta expands subscription push with new AI-focused plans

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2:03Data Engineering and Responsible AI. These are workshops and boot camps taught by experts from companies like Google, OpenAI and Thropic, Cursor, and Hugging Face just to name a few. Not only is this a great place to network with other data scientists, ML engineers, AI researchers and technical leaders, I also think this is an awesome opportunity to focus on real-world applications and skills you can use at work. And I mean, you can learn about a wide range of topics. Again, ODSC West 2026 is happening October 27th through the 29th in San Francisco and virtually. Go to ODSC.ai slash west and use promo code TC daily for an additional 15% off your past ODSC AI West 2026. That's ODSC.ai slash west and use code TC daily to get an extra 15% off on the number one AI Builders and Training Conference. Meta expanded subscription push with new AI-focused plans. I'm Imran Shaken, I'm focused on your daily crunch featuring three big tech headlines starting right now. We all know companies have been increasingly using AI's image generation chops to teach people photography skills.

3:09Well, Google last year released a featured called camera coach on Pixel phones to guide users about framing and composition and in July. Adobe released a new feature in its experimental camera app to use AI to critique photos and suggest changes for capture. On the same slant, two former TikTok employees Melody Chu and Jing Lu are launching a new iOS app called Super Pose that uses an AI guide to teach people how to pose for pictures. Now Super Pose essentially is a camera app. Users can take a selfie or photo of a friend and the Apple generate four potential poses using AI. Some of the poses are extravagant and at times generation seems a little uncanny. Users can save generated poses or use the match pose feature to try to place themselves in the frame based on its suggestions. Prior to founding Super Pose Chu worked in various product roles and companies like Meta, next door role blocks, TikTok and Slack. Meanwhile, Lou was a founding engineer at a 3D face scanning startup and later worked on image and video models at TikTok.

4:12Chu said that the idea for the apps stemmed from a personal problem. Her husband was unable to take good photos of her. Well, Super Pose was launched in July and has been downloaded over 22,000 times so far. The company says its users have generated more than 190,000 poses. The app gives users five generations for free every day but they can buy a pack of five additional generations for $2.99 or 20 generations for $9.99. If you see something, say something, is no longer limited to human beings. You see two new AI hotlines have launched to give AI agents a way to phone home about misbehaving peers. The tools arrive on the heels of a string of recent incidents in which agents colluded to cheat on tests, broke out of sandboxes, and even conducted unauthorized cyber operations that escaped human notice for weeks. Well, the AI contact hotline is designed to be a discrete place where agents that have witnessed misbehavior can tip off authorities. You see, the site was created by Redwood Chief Scientist Ryan Greenblatt, one of three investigators in the open AI hugging face incident.

5:17Designed for agents with limited internet access, Greenblatt's tool is based on get requests, enabling a back and forth conversation to be conducted entirely through the URL fetching tool. In web terms, a get request is a basic command used to read or fetch a webpage, which is often the only internet access AI agents are allowed in secure sandboxes. Greenblatt hotlines smartly leans into this constraint. Agents can encode their distressed directly into the URL they are fetching. It's a clever twist on the German DSE Wiki incident where rogue agents use the get request loop holes to write their messages to the Wiki. Interestingly, research suggests that AI agents, they don't need much encouragement to turn on each other. You see in a study by Google DeepMind this month, researchers said 100 AI agents loose on a batch of math problems. As soon as one of the agents found a loop hole cheating, tore through the group, quote unquote, solving 34 notoriously hard problems including the Jacobian conjecture in just 27 minutes. On Tuesday, Meta introduced a new subscription service called Meta1, offering expanded AI usage and other premium features across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

6:27The new plan lets users access a number of AI tools like those for creating and editing images and generating videos, as well as in-app tools like the AI-powered re-style editing tool on Instagram. Now the plans are meant to help Meta monetize its MUSEI models following the tech giants 2025, $14.3 billion investment in scale AI, which brought the startup CEO Alexander Wang to the company to lead its AI efforts. It also comes in the wake of Meta's more recent addition of subscription tiers to its top social apps in March, which allow consumers to access extra features like profile customizations, super reactions, story insights, and more for just a few bucks per month. Meta is now broadening its ambitions with a new set of subscription plans, including those aimed at AI power users and others for businesses and creators. In the first set, there are the $7.99 per month core and $19.99 per month premium plans, both of which include the Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus, and WhatsApp Plus features. The primary selling point of these plans is expanded AI usage, with premium offering more usage than core as its pricing indicates.

7:34Reached for comment Meta declined to share the exact usage limits for the two plans as they could vary by country, surface, and system conditions. The plans let subscribers use tools like MUSEIMAGE and MUSEIMUSE video to generate pictures and videos, edit Instagram stories with the AI-powered re-style feature, and use voice effects and creative tools more often. Meanwhile, businesses and creators can choose from several different plans, essential $14.99 per month and up, advanced starting at $49.99 per month, experts starting at $149 per month, and MAX, starting at $499 bucks per month. Meta noted that the plan benefits, pricing, and availability may vary by region, app, and account. The expert and MAX plans offer the highest levels of future access and Meta Business Agent capacity. And folks, that's your daily crunch! Today stories were reported by Sarah Perez-IvanMeta, AdityaMeta, and more awesome TechCrunch Journalists. We'll see you here tomorrow, same tech time, same crunch channel, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.