GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
The two key ingredients to Mark Zuckerberg’s all-in AI push? Money, and a heaping serving of misanthropy.
As part of his AI-first regime, Meta has fired thousands of employees while forcing the ones that remain to use the tech as much as possible, speeding them towards burnout. The expectation now is that they run a whole posse of AI agents that work in the background so a single employee can tackle multiple projects at the same time. If an employee doesn’t use AI enough, they’ll get dinged on their performance review. And while Meta’s future looks more uncertain than ever, Zuckerberg has turned his attention towards building a photorealistic AI clone of himself to make his micromanaging presence omnipresent throughout the company.
Morale, in other words, has been low. But it can and has gotten worse, after an executive essentially told staffers to suck it up when they questioned a sweeping new data-tracking initiative that many perceived as a thinly-veiled act of workplace surveillance, according to new reporting from The New York Times.
Last month, Meta leadership announced it would start tracking the mouse and keyboard inputs on tens of thousands of employees’ computers, with the ostensible mission of teaching its AI models “how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers.”
Seeing this as a clear violation of their privacy, employees immediately revolted. In response to the announcement, one engineering manager commented that the program made them “super uncomfortable” and asked how to “opt out.”
“There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop,” replied Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. His response was bombarded with over 100 angry and surprised emojis from employees, per the NYT.
Others spoke out. “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning,” another employee told Bosworth. Bosworth insisted that the data the company gathers “is very tightly controlled” and that there was no “leak risk.”
Things got even more bleak days later, when Meta said it was laying off around 8,000 employees, in cuts that would allow the company to “to offset the other investments we’re making,” Meta’s head of human resource Janelle Gale said in an internal message obtained by the NYT.
Those “other investments,” of course, are being poured into AI. Raising its previous estimates, Meta projected it would spend $145 billion by the end of this year, the lion’s share being spent on data centers and other AI related costs.
... continue reading