It is believed that in ancient Roman times, military generals used a strategy called Destruction To punish rebel groups of mercenaries. Essentially, they would kill one out of every 10 unruly soldiers as a terrible message to discipline the survivors. Today, the same strategy is clearly in play – not by bloodthirsty generals, but by tech billionaires decimating their ranks to free up money for AI.
In April, Metra announced it was laying off 10 percent of its workforce, or about 7,800 employees. Unlike traditional layoffs, which are implemented relatively quickly, Meta gave its employees about a month’s warning period without announcing who would actually head to the unemployment line.
Those layoffs took effect today, and it’s just as cruel As everyone expected. However, Mark Zuckerberg apparently decided that the usual cruelty and anger that comes with mass layoffs was not enough. In recently leaked audio from an all-hands meeting at Meta, released By more perfect unionIt seems like the Meta CEO is actually taunting the thousands of workers who were about to go, by pointing out how the company was using employee data to train its in-house AI models before the mass layoffs.
“So we’re in a phase where basically AI models learn from actually doing things, from actually watching smart people do things,” the tech billionaire said. “And if you’re trying to enable it to do certain capabilities, (AI) being able to see really smart people doing those things is very important.”
Going further, Zuckerberg explained that it was better to train AI on soon-to-be former Meta employees rather than “contract companies”, which was a more brutal practice. tech giant To cut costs associated with developing AI (including, of course) meta only.)
“In general, the average intelligence of the people who work at this company is significantly higher than the average group of people you can find working through contractors,” Zuckerberg said, stammering. “For example, if we’re trying to teach models how to code, by getting people to internally, um, create tools, or, or solve tasks, that help teach models how to code, we think the coding capabilities of our models will increase dramatically faster than others in the industry.”
The CEO’s comments certainly came as a double-edged sword for workers who aren’t sure whether they should clean up their resumes amid a terrible job market for tech workers. If they are the best of the best, and their labor is so important to training the company’s AI, why is Zuckerberg destroying them in the first place?
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