The two key ingredients to Mark Zuckerberg’s all-in AI push? Money, and a heaping serving of misanthropy.
As part of his AI-first regime, Meta has fired thousands of employees while forcing the ones that remain to use the tech as much as possible, speeding them towards burnout. The expectation now is that they run a whole posse of AI agents that work in the background so a single employee can tackle multiple projects at the same time. If an employee doesn’t use AI enough, they’ll get dinged on their performance review. And while Meta’s future looks more uncertain than ever, Zuckerberg has turned his attention towards building a photorealistic AI clone of himself to make his micromanaging presence omnipresent throughout the company.
Morale, in other words, has been low. But it can and has gotten worse, after an executive essentially told staffers to suck it up when they questioned a sweeping new data-tracking initiative that many perceived as a thinly-veiled act of workplace surveillance, according to new reporting from The New York Times.
Last month, Meta leadership announced it would start tracking the mouse and keyboard inputs on tens of thousands of employees’ computers, with the ostensible mission of teaching its AI models “how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers.”
Seeing this as a clear violation of their privacy, employees immediately revolted. In response to the announcement, one engineering manager commented that the program made them “super uncomfortable” and asked how to “opt out.”
“There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop,” replied Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. His response was bombarded with over 100 angry and surprised emojis from employees, per the NYT.
Others spoke out. “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning,” another employee told Bosworth. Bosworth insisted that the data the company gathers “is very tightly controlled” and that there was no “leak risk.”
Things got even more bleak days later, when Meta said it was laying off around 8,000 employees, in cuts that would allow the company to “to offset the other investments we’re making,” Meta’s head of human resource Janelle Gale said in an internal message obtained by the NYT.
Those “other investments,” of course, are being poured into AI. Raising its previous estimates, Meta projected it would spend $145 billion by the end of this year, the lion’s share being spent on data centers and other AI related costs.
A self-help cliche goes that change starts from within, and Meta has kickstarted the promised revolution AI will bring to the world by forcing it everywhere in its company. In March, it held an “AI Transformation Weeks” — yes, plural — program to teach employees how to use AI coding tools and agents, according to the NYT, and it also launched an internal dashboard to track how much they use their AI tools. Feeling the pressure to adopt the tech, there’re now so many AI agents throughout the company that employees are building AI agents to find other AI agents, and even rate them.
Meta may see itself as embracing the tech of the future, but Zuckerberg’s AI obsession is causing employees to worry about their own. Some told the NYT they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career, and others said they were exploring new options. Some are even trying to get fired so they can get severance pay.
“It’s incredibly demoralizing,” one Meta employee wrote in an internal post.
In a statement, Meta insisted that its data tracking program was simply to train its AI models, not a surveillance scheme.
“There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose,” a spokesperson told the NYT.