News

Instagram Tops 3B Users And Pushes New Reels & UI Tweaks

After hitting the significant milestone, the Meta-owned platform is adding new Reels controls and a navigation bar redesign.

Published

4 months ago

September 25, 2025

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has crossed 3 billion monthly users, making it Meta’s third app to reach the milestone after Facebook and WhatsApp. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri confirmed the figure this week, underlining Meta’s dominance in social platforms.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of that massive user count. Three billion monthly logins is more than a third of the global population. With Meta’s apps blocked in China and many regions still offline, the figure suggests over half of the connected world uses Instagram.

Reels In Focus

To mark the occasion, Instagram is testing a feature that shows which topics the Reels algorithm believes you’re interested in. Users can add, remove, or mute categories to shape their feed. Most may leave the system untouched, but it offers a manual lever for those who want it.

Instagram is also shifting its navigation. Direct Messages moves down to the bottom bar alongside Home and Reels, while the create button shifts to the top left and search nudges right. The redesign reflects where users spend most of their time.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Next Moves

Reels is already the app’s most used feature. Instagram has tested defaulting to Reels in some regions and on iPad, though for now the main feed still opens first. A full switch feels only a matter of time.

At 3 billion users, the platform is more than Meta’s third giant app — it’s another example of the company scaling compulsive behavior to a global audience.

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.

Published

2 days ago

January 15, 2026

Nour Nasir

uae-built falcon-h1 arabic leads llm benchmarks

Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute

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.

Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push

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.