Reuters reports that at an internal town hall Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of AI agent development had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected them to.
Earlier this year, Meta laid off some 8,000 employees — approximately 10% of its corporate workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported.
During this week’s meeting, Zuckerberg apparently commented on these job cuts — noting that they were not as “clean” as they should have been. The cuts were made because top officials at the company “were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt” to the changing landscape of the tech industry, Zuckerberg reportedly added.
The corporate leader also apparently said that the perceived upside of the new AI-focused company structure hadn’t “come to fruition yet,” although he said that he believed the company would begin to see improvements from its AI investments during the next three to six months. Several other investigative reports have depicted Meta’s months-old AI unit as a soul-crushing gulag, according to some of the engineers assigned to it.
Meta has invested heavily in AI and is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters reports.
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Yeah, this.
Do not underestimate their potential, everyone. They are going to fuck everything up. People are going to lose their jobs by major percentages in the near future if they aren’t put in check with laws, unions, and/or violence.
People are losing jobs already, and that’s not news. The catch: that’s not the big bright future as advertised, because next things are coming, namely:
The problem: if there is a hundred of high-ranking ceos/government officials who make key decisions, I would be thrilled. But judging by the state of affairs, we do not have even that (read: throwing other people’s money down the drain is going to drag on for annoyingly long time)