Meta Project OT plan to replace employees with AI agents

12 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by elboru
(thestreet.com)

7 Comments

menloshark

6 hours ago

I don't know what they were thinking with this one. Imagine this: you're in a little hellhole that tries to force you to work 7 days a week. It's already toxic and backstabbing is everywhere. You have to convince yourself that the work is worthwhile.

Then all of a sudden, the leadership says (out loud) that they're going to track your keystrokes to figure out how to automate your job, then fire you. Also, they're forcing 10% of the company to leave their current position (which they might be highly specialized in, PhDs even) to do data labeling grunt work so they can accomplish this. They're also laying off another 10% of the company, go figure.

First off, why would you (the hypothetical employee) want to do any good work for these people? It creates an outright antagonistic relationship between the company and its employees. The fact that they had the audacity to do all of this planning at a Hawaii offsite just rubs salt in the wound to be honest. It's like they read some McKinsey bullshit about AI and lost their fucking mind.

cosmicgadget

8 hours ago

Zuck would be the richest man on the planet if he had just let someone else take over 15 years ago.

mc32

9 hours ago

Even without the presumed capable A.I. A company like Meta could shed 60% and if done with precision and not suffer greatly. Twitter showed that many companies were running bloated workforces. They have slowly shed some of the excess over the last few years. With the right decisions they could "right-size" the org down by 60% without affecting products and services much. There might be some transition where adjustments take place, but it's not like they'd collapse.

menloshark

6 hours ago

> A company like Meta could shed 60% and if done with precision and not suffer greatly.

It's entirely self inflicted. A bunch of the headcount is thrown at exploratory initiatives which aren't necessary for keeping the lights on. The leadership has done an incredibly bad job at diversification (compared to Google for example). If the Metaverse was successful and revenue generating, the "true" headcount of non-bullshit jobs would be larger for example.

Also the company is publicly traded, Twitter is a private company. The stock is priced at a current forward multiple which expects future growth. If the ads growth story stops happening (and they're not diversifying in other lanes, which it seems like they're incapable of doing), the stock is going to take a hit. "Keeping the lights on" is not going to pan out well in this case.

Also if you fire 60%, how do you (the hypothetical CEO) identify who to fire if every manager at every level of the chain is incentivized to lie to you and overstate the significance of what they're doing? There is no precision here.

zhivota

8 hours ago

I agree, my experience working in large organizations is that there is a ton of bloat everywhere you look.

I also think it would be good for the industry, too many really talented people are tied up in these super high paying jobs at the top companies, when they could be contributing elsewhere (the "golden handcuffs" effect).

In fact it was always my assumption that companies with basically unstoppable revenue streams (Google, Facebook, Visa, etc.) were, in part, overpaying and over-hiring just to remove the top end of talent from the market completely, and reduce the risk of being disrupted from startups and smaller competitors. It's interesting that they are finally backing away from that - I imagine that the AI boom has made them feel threatened for the first time in a long time.

cosmicgadget

8 hours ago

Everyone was bloated by covid incentives. Twitter showed that if you have a moat you can cut your workforce down to keeping the lights on (for the most part) at the cost of innovation and growth. Many companies have to innovate or at least turn out product revisions to stay competitive.

altmanaltman

7 hours ago

> While the company was pulling back from its most aggressive workforce reduction plans, Zuckerberg was building something for himself.

> He has been using a personal AI agent, described internally as a “CEO agent,” that allows him to retrieve answers he would typically have to go through multiple layers of staff to get, Euronews reported.

I don't know why I found this hilarious. Like what problem is the AI solving here that makes it revolutionary, break down the stupid 50 level chain of command that you yourself created? Like did he really think he could replace the C suite with an AI agent? If so, dude probably went through his own AI pyschosis period