Mark Zuckerberg is preparing Meta for a full-on AI makeover with more automated workers. He’s even building a personal AI agent designed to make executive-level decisions, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Don’t worry, though, he’s not going to fire himself. That’s a fate reserved for the thousands of people viewed as replaceable cogs from behind the C-suite glass.
Per WSJ’s report, Zuck imagines a future in which every Meta employee has an AI agent assistant working alongside them. He’s decided to start the buddy system with himself and is working with his AI team to develop an agent that will help him get information faster by providing more of an overview of what is happening across his company.
Meta’s head seems to feel like there is too much redundancy and extra layers across the company of about 78,000 people, and, according to the Journal, the AI is supposed to cut down on the need to have a question go through multiple people before arriving at an answer. Given AI’s tendency to hallucinate information or provide answers without clear sourcing to confirm its accuracy, this surely won’t have unintended consequences.
While Zuck is getting an AI assistant to help him run the show, the rest of the company is at risk of losing their jobs to AI instead of getting paired with an autonomous partner. Reuters reported last week that Meta is planning to slash as much as 20% of its workforce in the coming weeks—the latest in a series of significant layoffs that have hit the company in recent years, driven in no small part by failed initiatives to pour money into future-focused endeavors that don’t pan out (looking at you, Metaverse).
It seems those layoffs, which haven’t been finalized and don’t have a date, per the report, will be positioned as AI-related. In a way, they definitely will be. Meta has spent a ton on AI investments in recent years, and plans to pour another $135 billion into building out infrastructure, per CNBC. Now it seems it’s cutting costs elsewhere (read: payroll) to counter the massive sum that it’s poured into trying to stay competitive in the AI space. One way to save on salary would have been not offering $100 million pay packages to AI experts in an effort to lure them away from competitors, but maybe the AI agent can whisper that into Mark’s ear and get him to listen.
Meta’s entire AI effort has been a mess thus far, undergoing a number of restructuring efforts to try to figure out how to get anyone to care about Meta AI. It hasn’t had much luck thus far. If nothing else, Zuckerberg’s AI agent CEO will give him someone other than himself to blame for why the next reorganization fails, too, so at least it’ll be good for something.
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