Chapter 1: What recent changes has Meta announced regarding its workforce?
Last week, Meta said it was laying off 10% of its roughly 80,000 employees.
Meta says it'll lay off about 8,000 employees starting next month. The company's also canceling plans to fill 6,000 open roles as it plans to invest more on developing artificial intelligence.
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 are 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.
Hmm. 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. How can I opt out? Spoiler, there is no way to opt out.
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Chapter 2: How is Meta planning to integrate AI into employee workflows?
But in the last few years, Meta's AI tools have trailed behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, which have been making big strides developing AI chatbots that can do research, write cover letters, and even code. Last year, to try and up its game, Meta started poaching top AI talent with huge offers.
Meta now notching another name in its expensive hunt for AI talent, poaching a top Apple executive.
Coming from the buzziest and earliest AI native firms, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta finds itself sort of racing to catch up, right? And so they were giving out $100 million offers to researchers trying to basically rebuild this team and become competitive.
Multi-year deals worth $300 million. These are for scientists and engineers. This is wild. It's like NBA superstar money. With some of them receiving $100 million straight up in year one. $100 million. Wow.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so they build this new team, they hire Alexander Wang from Scale.ai, and they basically just redo their whole AI efforts from scratch.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of AI on employee performance evaluations at Meta?
Wang and his team have developed the most powerful AI model Meta has produced so far. It's called MuseSpark, and it was launched earlier this month.
The new model is competitive with OpenAI and Google and Anthropic. It's not the best model, but it's good enough to keep them in the race. And they've sort of proven that like, hey, we're still here, we're still fighting, we're still in it, don't count us out. And now they're trying to race to get ahead to the frontier.
Meta AI, as its chatbot is known, is designed to compete with chatbots like ChatGPT, Clod, and Gemini. And it's baked into the company's existing apps, like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. And compared to some of its rivals, Meta has a key advantage. It already has a huge potential user base.
Meta has 3.5 billion daily users around the world.
That would be a lot of people that could use the chatbot.
It's a lot of people that could use the chatbot, exactly. And so, you know, investors and analysts argue that Meta has the distribution. That's not the problem, right? Like if you're Cloud or you're ChatGPT, the companies behind those chatbots, you're trying to grow. You're trying to get people to use these things. But like you're starting from scratch. Like you don't already have a user base.
Meta already has a huge, huge user base. And so what they're trying to do is more about getting people to adopt this chatbot approach That's what their kind of unique problem is that they're trying to solve.
Meta hopes to use its AI chatbot as a way to supercharge its already highly profitable ad business.
In December, Meta started using your conversations with their chatbot to target and show you ads on Instagram.
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Chapter 4: How is Meta utilizing employee data to improve its AI models?
And so if I, you know, use those conversations that I had, Meta can take that and start showing me ads for things in Japan on Instagram now that I might want to click on. Maybe it's tours. Maybe it's restaurants to go eat at, whatever it is. And so they sell ads. They're very good at this. So this is also another way for them to— make that ads business even better and more lucrative for them.
I mean, Google Search is a massive business. And this is almost a way that Meta can steal some of that business, essentially, by giving people a place where they can ask questions. And then Meta can mine that for data it can use to deliver more ads to you.
Exactly. It's sort of twofold.
Yes. The ultimate futuristic AI product that Meta is working towards is AI Agents. these agents would be able to act as personal assistants or more.
So what Mark Zuckerberg has said is he wants everyone to have their own personal super intelligence. He thinks people, as I reported last year, he thinks people have the capacity to have more friends than they do and that AI can solve some of these problems.
The average American I think has, I think it's fewer than three friends. Three people that they'd consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or something.
And also you can get an AI to go out and like do things for you and just help you in your life.
I think as the personalization loop kicks in and the AI just starts to get to know you better and better, I think that will just be really compelling. Employees at Meta already have access to one such agent called Myclaw.
Myclaw has access to like a bunch of your different things, right? Like it might have access to like all your G chats, all your like work projects, like your whole drive, all your emails. And so it doesn't need the context that you would have to tell a chatbot to do, right? It can just go and like, it has access to everything. So it can actually be more proactive.
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Chapter 5: What AI initiatives is Mark Zuckerberg personally involved in?
Oh, yeah. I think I was just saving those.
Yeah, like a chatbot, it's like you have to go to it and you have to converse with it. It can reach out to you. It can text you first. But like it's different. Like an agent, I think, takes things like just one step further.
Do you know how Mark Zuckerberg is using that CEO agent that he's been working on?
It's still early. I think the agent is helping him retrieve information faster. So before he might have to go through multiple layers of people to find information. Now he can just ask his agent to go find wherever it is and, you know, the emails or the drives or whatever and get the answer versus having to, you know, do that manually.
like telephone game of like, hey, can you go ask this person this? Yeah, let me go ask this person this, et cetera, et cetera. That takes time. So it's still early days, but that's one of the initial things that we know that he's using his agent for.
Coming up, how Meta's AI transformation is affecting the people who work there. So can you walk me through how this giant pivot to AI at Meta is affecting the company's employees?
Yeah, I'm going to pull back up a little bit more. So just to get a sense of how this company has gotten to where it is, during the pandemic, it roughly doubled its workforce. It got up to like 87,000 people. And then Mark Zuckerberg declared year of efficiency and they did a bunch of layoffs. That got the headcount down to about 67,000. And since then, it's sort of continued to climb back up.
It's now at around, prior to all these cuts, was around 80%. 78,000. And then last year, it comes out that employees are going to start to be graded on how much they use AI.
And Meta's leadership expects employees to use AI a lot.
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