Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta might be lagging behind its competitors in terms of the most obvious marks of artificial intelligence success—i.e., getting people hooked on its particular set of copy-and-pasted answers barfed out to easily researched questions—but it is striving to innovate elsewhere. Specifically, in the field of replacing jobs with this crap, as CNBC reports that the Facebook company is not only laying off 8,000 employees—roughly 10 percent of its total workforce—but also eliminating 6,000 open positions, reducing its overall workforce by a whopping 14,000 jobs.
This news arrives less than a week after Meta revealed that those employees it will retain are quietly having “AI training dummies” added to their list of duties; in its race to catch up with firms like OpenAI, Zuckerberg’s company recently rolled out a “Model Capability Initiative” (shudder) that logs its employees’ keystrokes when they’re on any number of work-related sites and programs, so that that data can then be fed into its own AI systems. Say what you like about Meta’s last attempt to mine out the future, but at least the Metaverse only produced some extremely goofy VR videos, and not quite this level of full-on dystopic “train your own half-assed computer replacement” horrorshow.
Big tech is facing layoffs across the board, meanwhile, not because there’s not money floating around—there are still, obviously, stupid amounts of money floating around—but because more and more companies are buying into the idea that they can replace these workers with glorified chatbots without completely crippling themselves. Microsoft revealed this week that it’s offering voluntary buyouts to 7 percent of its human resources, Amazon started mass layoffs at the beginning of the year, and this is actually Meta’s second wave of job cuts of late, after cutting employees working on Metaverse projects back in January. The new Meta layoffs are expected to go into effect next month.
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