Now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a metaverse has collapsed in on itself, the billionaire has moved onto his next money pit: a wildly expensive “Superintelligence” unit.
But those who’ve survived several brutal rounds of layoffs at the company aren’t exactly thrilled to be part of his new vision for it. As Wired reports, morale within Meta’s 6,500-staffer Applied AI team, which was created in March to support the Superintelligence Labs, is hitting rock bottom.
Three employees who spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity said that the weekly busywork tasks they are being assigned, like generating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta’s AI models, is “soul-crushing.”
“It’s literally the gulag,” one employee told Wired. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”
One employee-only presentation was reportedly interrupted by a disillusioned worker, who accused a Meta AI executive of “being the company’s b****,” encouraging others to write him and “tell him that he’s a piece of s***.”
Zooming out, Meta’s AI-focused restructuring has seen thousands of employees sacked, forcing those who remain to take on additional workloads. One employee who was laid off was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents almost immediately, with their colleagues’ cries to higher ups falling on deaf ears.
A petition has also been signed by more than 1,600 employees, opposing a draconian new initiative that involves installing software on work computers to track everything employees to, including keystrokes and clicks, data that’s then fed to train AI.
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work, and our role is to direct, review and help them improve,” Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told staff in an April memo obtained by Reuters.
Meta is also furiously trying to contain a different surveillance-related PR crisis after Wired reported last week that Meta had discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its smart glasses.
In short, Meta’s leadership has plenty of fires to contain as the AI race heats up among its competitors. Zuckerberg has caught onto the “record-low morale,” arguing in a Friday memo that “we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more.”
“As we navigate this period, I’m also focused on providing as much stability going forward as possible,” he added.
Zuckerberg promised last month that the mass firings would cease for at least seven more months.
Whether his attempts to rein in the chaos will be able to breathe life into a catastrophic AI department is dubious at best.
In his memo last week, Zuckerberg specifically addressed morale inside his company’s Applied AI team, calling the grunt work “critical to advancing our models.”
However, given the well-established reputation of their employer, netizens struggled to conjure up much sympathy for the Applied AI employees. Their argument: the workers knew what they had signed up for.
“Zuckerberg is only able to build his nation-consuming spyware because they willingly take his money,” one user commented on Wired‘s reporting. “Now all of the sudden they’re persecuted because they’re being mildly inconvenienced while constructing his slop empire? Give me a break.”
“So these employees were fine with creating soul crushing AI that would be forced on other workers at other companies or that would take their jobs,” another user wrote, “as long as they felt the work was challenging in the process?”
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