Brian Barrett

We'll find out soon.

There's another story involving the AI industry going on this week.

It's actually been going on for months, but we had an inflection point recently that makes it, I think, worth talking about now.

Meta recently announced layoffs that are supposedly being made because of AI, potentially, at least that's what people say.

The company plans to cut 10% of its workforce, which is going to be about 8,000 employees.

and it's also planning to close another 6,000 open roles.

The same day Meta makes that announcement, Microsoft said it would offer voluntary buyouts to nearly 9,000 employees, which is the first time that Microsoft has made that kind of offer.

The memo where Meta shared the news about its layoffs, it doesn't explicitly mention AI, but the company has obviously announced that it's nearly doubling its spending on the technology.

It is huge amount of sums going towards data centers, CapEx, infrastructure.

And it's not just white collar employees that are being affected.

That gets a lot of the headlines, but there's a particular group of contractors that Wired's Joel Khalili talked to that's being hit by the layoffs as well.

It's more than 700 workers based in Ireland.

And what's interesting there is they're the ones who have been training Meta's AI models themselves, or among the people, so contractors who work to train these models.

They're employed by a Dublin-based firm called Kovalin, which handles various content moderation and labeling service jobs for Meta.

And their job is to check the material generated by Meta AI models against the company's rules that bar dangerous and illegal stuff.

It's tough work, right?

It's tough both for what it is and also the realization that while you're doing it, you're basically training AI to take over your job, right?

It is a job that is designed to be obsolete as soon as you do it well enough.

I think that's absolutely right.

I think a couple other things are happening, too.