Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search’s Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates

Leah Feiger: Let’s invest.

Zoë Schiffer: They have that going for a while.

Leah Feiger: It wasn’t full Google, but it—

Zoë Schiffer: Somewhat there.

Leah Feiger: —had that vibe. To me, someone so on the outside of this in every single way, I know about these layoffs because they’ve been, A) so chaotic, but B) in some ways, needlessly so. Not to say that other tech companies aren’t firing scores of workers all the time. That feels like something we discuss on this podcast frequently, but this is happening with such a large runway and in a way that’s making employees feel so terrible about themselves.

Brian Barrett: Well, because it’s not just the layoffs, right? It’s also, even if you stay there, if you’re not culled from the herd, you are going to have to deal with this world in which you’ve got spyware on your laptops training AI to probably take your job at some point, right?

Zoë Schiffer: Explain that a little bit.

Brian Barrett: Meta announced, and this was more public, that they were going to put software on employee laptops that would monitor their keystrokes and how they move their cursors and basically how they do their job as Meta engineers and use that as training data for their own internal models to try to make their AI models better because they’re running out of other sources.

Zoë Schiffer: And could you opt out of that, Brian?

Brian Barrett: That’s a great question. I’m so glad you asked. You could not opt out.

Zoë Schiffer: I felt you didn’t know the answer to that one.

Brian Barrett: In fact, when an employee asked in a very public forum within Meta, “Hey, could we not do this?” Zoë, the response was?

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, absolutely you’re going to do this and shame on you for asking. And some of the employees who are staying, actually thousands of the employees who are staying, are getting drafted into the AI ranks. We published a piece today that was kind of about the morale inside the company, but also how there’s been this mad dash to use up perks and stipends that employees have. But one of the things that’s said at the end was that remaining employees are being asked to join AI teams. So whatever your job was previously, they’re internally getting drafted. You’re getting drafted into the AI ranks, now your job is going to look quite different.

Brian Barrett: That’s like 7,000 people.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes.

Leah Feiger: I’ve actually heard people use the word raptured.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my gosh.

Leah Feiger: Isn’t that—

Zoë Schiffer: And I wish we had that in the story.

Leah Feiger: I’m so sorry, but raptured into other teams. All of a sudden one day they’ve just disappeared. After this layoff, has Zuckerberg and co proposed a sort of coherent leadership plan or proposal? What happens after this?