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In ancient Roman times, military generals are thought to have used a tactic known as decimation to punish mutinous groups of mercenary soldiers. Essentially, they’d kill one in every 10 unruly soldiers as a horrifying message to discipline those who remained. Today, the same tactic is evidently in play — not by bloodthirsty generals, but by tech billionaires thinning their ranks to free up money for AI.
Back in April, Meta announced it was laying off 10 percent of its workforce, or around some 7,800 workers. Unlike traditional layoffs, which are enacted relatively quickly, Meta gave its employees a nearly month-long warning period without announcing who exactly would be headed for the unemployment line.
Those layoffs went into effect today, and it’s exactly as brutal as everybody anticipated. Mark Zuckerberg, however, evidently decided the usual cruelty and angst that comes with massive layoffs wasn’t enough. In newly leaked audio from an all-hands meeting at Meta, released by More Perfect Union, the Meta CEO seems to actually be taunting the thousands of workers who were about to be let go by pointing to how the company was harvesting employee data to train its in-house AI models ahead of the massive layoffs.
“So we’re in a phase where basically the AI models learn from heaving real, from watching really smart people do things,” the tech billionaire said. “And if you’re trying to get it to be able to be able to do certain capabilities, having [AI] be able to observe really smart people doing those things is, is very important.”
Going on, Zuckerberg explained that it was better to train AI on soon-to-be-former Meta employees, rather than “contract companies,” another cruel practice used by tech giants to cut down costs associated with developing AI (including, of course, Meta itself.)
“In general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks if you’re working through… contractors,” Zuckerberg stammered. “So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally, um, build tools that, or, or solve tasks that, um, that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our models coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do.”
The CEO’s comments surely came as a double-edged sword for workers who aren’t sure whether they should be dusting off their resumes amidst a horrible job market for tech workers. If they’re the best of the best, and their labor is so crucial to training the company’s AI, then why on Earth is Zuckerberg decimating them in the first place?
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