Last week, Meta said it was laying off 10% of its roughly 80,000 employees.
The layoffs are part of a larger transformation that's happening within Meta right now.
As the company tries to reinvent itself as an AI powerhouse,
Meta said it would use the savings from the layoffs to balance out its huge investments in AI.
This year, the company is planning to spend up to $135 billion on the technology.
And for the employees who are left, they're being asked to incorporate AI into their jobs.
Teams are being flattened.
And in performance reviews, workers are assessed by how much they use AI.
And Meta isn't just using AI to make its employees more efficient.
The company is also using its workforce and the way they work,
like at their desks, to train the company's most advanced AI models.
A memo went out on Tuesday from a researcher who works on building the models.
And they said, hey guys, our models need to get better at learning how to use computers.
That's our colleague Megan Bobrowski.
And so therefore, we are now going to be monitoring your keystrokes, your mouse movements, and your click locations,
feed that data to our AI models to help them understand basically how to use a computer.
That sounds.
Kind of dystopian.
A lot of employees were not happy about this.
The top-ranked comment on this post was, this makes me super uncomfortable.