The tech giant Meta fired about 8,000 workers yesterday — about 10 percent of its staff — and reassigned 7,000 more to AI projects. The company’s remaining workers continue to have every click of their work lives monitored as the company pivots from expensive project to even-more-expensive project — but not to worry! According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, there won’t be any more layoffs for at least seven more months.
Meta first told employees that the massive workforce cuts were coming back in April, leaving staff in employment limbo until Wednesday. According to the New York Times, the layoffs were announced in a company memo, in which Zuckerberg declared that “AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes” and that the “companies that lead the way will define the next generation.”
Per the NYT, Zuckerberg further noted in the memo that he doesn’t expect another large culling to take place this year. You know, the year that’s already close to halfway over.
The not-particularly-comforting guarantee comes as morale at Meta is already wildly low. As Reuters reported in April, the social media behemoth recently installed new surveillance software on Meta apps and devices that’s designed to track and store its workers’ computer use — down to every click, keystroke, and mouse movement — in an effort to use that data to train AI models.
In a memo obtained Reuters, Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told staff that it was using the data to train AI agents capable of performing similar tasks.
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work,” read the memo, “and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.”
In other words, Meta employees are currently being forced to train agents expressly designed to do exactly what they do.
Some workers are pushing back: according to the NYT‘s reporting, Meta buildings have been plastered with flyers decrying the mass train-your-replacement effort, and according to the Wall Street Journal, more than 1,500 staffers have signed a petition against the surveillance.
As it stands, however, there’s no way for the company’s remaining employees to opt out of the AI-training program on their devices. Meaning that while they might be safe through the end of the year, the act of continuing to do their jobs could ultimately help put them out of one in the future.
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