Transcript
Ryan Knudsen (0:05)
Last week, Meta said it was laying off 10% of its roughly 80,000 employees.
News Reporter (0:11)
Meta says it'll lay off about 8,000 employees starting next month. The company is also canceling plans to fill 6,000 open roles as it plans to invest more on developing artificial intelligence.
Ryan Knudsen (0:22)
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.
Megan Bobrowski (1:08)
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.
Ryan Knudsen (1:21)
That's our colleague, Megan Bobrowski.
Megan Bobrowski (1:23)
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.
Commentator/Analyst (1:37)
Hmm, that sounds kind of dystopian.
Megan Bobrowski (1:41)
A lot of employees were not happy about this. The top ranked comment on this post was, this makes me super uncomfortable. How can I opt out? Spoiler. There is no way to opt out.
Commentator/Analyst (1:55)
So it seems like Meta is going all in, like, in every conceivable way, from the products that it's making to what it expects of its own employees.
Megan Bobrowski (2:06)
Yeah, it's AI all the time. Mark Zuckerberg himself is working on building a CEO agent to help him do his job. They've also just announced initiatives across the board trying to get their employees to adopt these things. And. And then it's almost for not to
Ryan Knudsen (2:23)
