News
Instagram Tests Vertical Profile Grids Instead Of Squares
A company spokesperson says the “limited test” is happening because the “vast majority” of Instagram uploads are vertically-oriented content.
Instagram is testing a potentially major change to profile pages: making the squares in your profile grid vertical rectangles. Some users recently spotted the test, and there have been indications from at least 2022 that the company has toyed with a rectangular grid.
“The vast majority of what is uploaded to Instagram today is vertical,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri explained in a Story on Friday, August 16, discussing the test. “It’s either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal”.
Mosseri revealed that “squares are from way back in the day when you could only upload square photos to Instagram,” a limitation the platform removed nearly a decade ago. Mosseri told users that the company knows that the changes may be annoying for those who have spent a great deal of effort and time “curating and making sure everything lines up” but says, “I would really like to do better by the content today”.
“We’re testing a vertical profile grid with a small number of people,” Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai said in a recent statement to journalists. “This is a limited test, and we’ll be listening to feedback from the community before rolling anything out further”.
So it looks as though perfectionists who have planned out their profile grids around squares might be a little annoyed when the entire site moves over to vertical rectangle content.
Also Read: How To Permanently Delete Your Instagram Account
Here’s the full transcript of Mosseri’s explanation:
“We’re actually testing a vertical grid, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, for your profile, instead of squares. Now, squares are from way back in the day when you can only upload square photos to Instagram. I know this can be annoying for some of you who really spent a lot of time curating and making sure everything lines up, but I would really like to do better by the content today. The vast majority of what is uploaded to Instagram today is vertical. It’s either 4 by 3 in a photo or 9 by 16 in a video, and cropping it down to square is pretty brutal. So, I’m hoping we can figure out a way to manage this transition”.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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