What is Zuckerberg doing?

The meta situation is actually somehow worse. For those that don't know anything about meta, Facebook, or the Instagram situation, let me just give you a quick uh speed run of its history. Facebook went super hard in VR, then found out, "Yo, VR is not actually where it's at. It's all about AI." And then decided that it's going to fire a roughly 10% of its company or 8,000 employees and focus super hard on AI. And a part of that focusing super hard on AI, it's going to record everybody's desktop and everything you do and then feed that to the AI. Not only that, it's going to create a new organization, Applied AI, where it's going to put approximately 10% of the company into it, where they're going to help train and make the next generation of AI. Of course, during all this, is Zuckerberg on a phone call called everybody super highly intelligent, the most high-IQ people in the valley. And then after saying all of that, said that the reason why they're recording your desktop and not telling you why is because it's for your own best interest. Not strategically in your interest for us to communicate everything like in all the detail that we normally would on this. But now, the internals are coming out. Employees are coming forward and speaking about what's actually going on inside of Facebook. They They does not look good. It does not look good at all. In fact, this is somehow the least bad thing coming out of Facebook, which is they just shipped JSON that's not even possible to production. The golden age of slop has arrived and it's happening right now live at Facebook. But the internal employee morale is even worse than this. Like imagine working at a place where they're like, "You ain't got time to set up a CI/CD pipeline to make sure JSON parses." That's where we're at. But first, I'd like to say a quick thank you to the sponsors. Hey, is that HTTP? Get that out of here. That's not how we order coffee. We order coffee via SSH, terminal.shop. Yeah, you want a real experience? You want real coffee? You want awesome subscription so you never have to remember again? Oh, you want exclusive blends with exclusive coffee and exclusive content? Then check out Crown. You don't know what SSH is? Well, maybe the coffee is not for you. [music] All right, thank you. The best way to support the channel, check out the sponsors. Links down in the description. Okay, so welcome back. Let's talk about this. We're going to look at this by looking at what the employees are saying. I am going to both laugh at the situation and make fun of an employee or two for this because they describe things rather ridiculously. But then we're going to look at how the company is talking about it. How the management is talking about it, which is also somehow super ridiculous and is even more nuts than how the employees look at it. Now, a lot of this information comes from the Wired article. You got to go check it out. It's linked in the description. But it starts off with the title of tell him he's a piece of [ __ ] Meta's new AI unit is a total mess. Yes, it is absolutely a total mess. So now that that little quote, that little line comes from actually a live town hall in which thousands of employees were all in a single meeting video call with some present presenters going over some sort of information. Someone just joins, flips out a mic, goes hot mic and is just lets out a four-letter rant for the ages finishing up with hey, you know the meta AI executives? Yo, go tell Go tell him he's a piece of [ __ ] Imagine being in that call because the presenters, it even says one of the presenters covered their faces with their hands. A according to a witness. Of course, you know why they were covering their faces. They were laughing, okay? You can't You can't be showing all the people that you're laughing at some profanity-laced AI rant, especially when you're the one presenting. You just got to You just got to cover your face and pretend it doesn't happen. So what's happening is since April a new org has has formed in which about 6,500 employees have joined. Now, they have joined in waves, and it's described as this. The organization has grown in batches since early April. It's crazy to watch people experience the shock of it as each wave comes in. So, this organization is not necessarily known for being fantastic. So, what's actually happening is that they're taking all of their talented engineers, right? These really top talented the best, the most intelligent engineers that are possible at Facebook, and they're assembling them into this team, and they're given about two tasks per week to finish. And these tasks, they involve generating complex software coding problems to help AI scientists better train and evaluate the performance of the latest frontier models. Meaning, they're not actually solving or building anything real. They're coming up with toy examples, toy coding problems, and actually like using their collective power of thousands of engineers to create the ideal coding examples to train the AI. So, that means that employees, not only are they getting their screens recorded, which by the way, just in case you're wondering, the screen recording, the company has scaled the program back slightly, allowing employees to pause the data collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions. So, just in case they want to do a little bit of Twitter following or whatever or whatever goes on for 30 minutes on an employee laptop that I do not care to want to know, they're just asking for some exemptions, and Facebook has granted it in their infinite wisdom. Facebook is not only recording the desktops, they have thousands of people handcrafting curated beautiful coding challenges to make the greatest coding robot of all time. Like they are literally hiring and making it explicit. They're trying to figure out a way to replace employees, and all these employees work on it. They're They're They're actually trying their darndest. But, how do the engineers feel about this? Well, the engineers selected for the unit have no choice to join or leave the company. That's right. So, if you were an engineer and you were working on say some social media feature for the billions of users of WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook, they say, "Hey, by the way, you're in on the new program." And if you say, "I don't want to be in on the new program." They're like, "All right, then leave the company, idiot." An unusual requirement for a highly valued technical employees in the Silicon Valley. That's led some members of the applied AI to describe themselves as draftees. Yes, the employees are actually comparing themselves like this is their Vietnam. They're like, "Bro, it's Vie- [laughter] I actually can't even say that with a straight face. It's so ridiculous. Like they're actually being forced into this thing or being fired and they're calling themselves draftees. It is It is absolute cinema over there. This, of course, led to one employee saying, "It's literally the gulag. You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden. You barely interact with anyone. You just have these tasks every week." Now, I I do admit that does sound awful. That does not sound like some kind of fulfilling job where you're just simply trying to develop whatever that coding challenge is that you have to develop and you're just kind of answering to this amorphous blob of AI scientists in which you have no light into. You have no real meaning or impact at your job. You have no idea if you're affecting anybody or nobody. And you actually don't even know if you're training your replacement or not. Like I get that. That would not be that great. I would probably find myself pretty unhappy and probably applying around at some different jobs. But to describe it as a gulag, the gulag, just in case anybody's wondering, is best known for random beatings, brutalized torture, high amounts of starvation, absolute exposure to the elements, and lots of diseases and public defecation. Like it is I hate to break this to you, but your sushi lunches and like not meaningful work is just not the same as a gulag. I can't I can't I can't even believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe I'm defending Facebook [laughter] in this situation. Another employees describe some of these tasks generating puzzles to test how reliable AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them. As easy as compared to software development work they had been doing previously, but the new projects feel menial and almost all employees seem unhappy, they say. Most people find their work soul-crushing, a third employee says. All right, I can't actually make fun of the employees anymore. Like I do understand that boring work can be really, really frustrating. I do remember sitting in my car and actually being like, "God, help me have the patience to do the work at my job." Cuz I too worked at a soul-crushing company for quite some time and like I In some sense, I do get that feeling, but it does seem it does seem a little overblown there. But how is management responding to all this? During a meeting this week to all employees at Instagram, and Meta chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the difficult and brutal environment created by the insanity of this company in the past few months, according to the recording heard by Wired. Cox applauded the Instagram employees for launching features and serving around 2 billion users amid what he compared to running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm, and then like your teammates get replaced, and then we're recording you. I mean, hey, at least at least he's somewhat honest about the situation. But then, you know what he says right afterwards? He gives a fantastic summary of AI. Cox said that he needed to reckon with how he and other leaders could get in touch with the company again and not be over-earnest about the power of AI. It is neither God nor it's the devil, he said. It's nowhere near as good as you think it is, and it's nowhere near as bad as you think it is, and it changes every day, and it doesn't know what day of the week it is. Hey, not bad, Chris Cox, good save. But what is the company doing? Now, this is, I think, the largest failure of this entire situation. Okay, listen to this. Zuckerberg reiterated a vow not to carry out additional mass layoffs this year. Okay, so he's letting you know, you got 6 months of peace. By the way, just saying it that way is so nuts. Like he's even he's saying, "Hey, we're going to probably lay off more people, just not right now." He introduced a plan to limit the number of employees per manager, which some teams, such as Applied AI, had deliberately ballooned to a ratio of 50 to 1. That's That number makes no sense. Like Jensen Huang doesn't even have that many, and he's considered the most unusual CEO of a company of all time. Like how does this even happen on a team? Like how do you even organize or do anything with 50 direct reports? So, the big plan, of course, is more money for team events, which, of course, everybody knows team events is really what makes you happy. You know, like nothing's better than spending a little extra time at the office and getting something bougie out of it, right? Like that's that's what makes you a good employee. And the other one, of course, is a hackathon designed to bring the company back together again. Now, let's not We I don't think we have to think too hard about this one, okay? I think we could both see the problem with this. Now, imagine for a second, you're at a company in which you've been drafted into a new organization, you're doing menial work you're not happy about, you're getting a lot of tasks you feel like you have no insight into it, a bunch of your, you know, co-employees have all been fired. So, what does management do? Hey, everybody, let's recreate Navy SEALs Hell Week, except instead of trouncing through the ocean sand, we are instead going to be hacking on the products you already work on nonstop for a week. We're going to call it a hackathon, and then everybody's going to get pizza and an award at the end of it. How do you not see that that's not going going a good idea? Okay, like I am I am no Nostradamus, but hackathons aren't great when people feel burnt out, okay? This is not a way to win the employees. Anyways, I just thought this was so funny because we're watching in real time one of the largest companies on Earth slowly implode in on itself. Now, will it actually implode in on itself? I don't know. Right now, it's set on pace to exceed uh Google for ad revenue. It is by all accounts absolutely just making hand over fist money. So, will it actually implode? I don't know. But, will it lose a lot of the top-tier talent? Likely. And now, will that lead it into such a technical disaster that it has no other choice but people leaving the platform for somewhere else? Now, that is actually a real situation. Again, hundreds of thousands of Down Detector reports, Facebook absolutely crashing, and JSON lexical errors being brought to the front end, letting you know that a JSON cannot be parsed. This cannot be a coincidence, okay? This cannot be a coincidence. Deep employee morale hits, plus increasing instability, plus increasingly weird management decisions, all are going to come together just to create some of the worst products on Earth. I just wanted to talk about this because it's just shocking to see. You know, as somebody who worked in the Valley, Facebook at one time was considered a very prestigious place to work, right? The best engineers got to go work there, okay? You were going to get treated the best, you were going to get paid the most, and you're going to work on problems that were likely some of the hardest problems you've worked on, right? It was supposed to be a great place to go and work super hard if that's what you were into. But now, look at it. It's like a disaster. It's like every single month the reporting gets worse and worse coming out of it. I just It's It's crazy to see these things happen to companies in which used to be the tippity top. All right, anyhow, hey, the name is you know, the prime gen, okay, hey, hi. It's nice to see you. I hope I hope you're doing well. Are you doing well? Like what's going on with you, you know? Do you come here often? I don't know, you know, you guys What are you guys doing? I'm going to get a haircut. Did you know that? Yeah, I'm going to get a haircut. It's honestly, it's just too big like look at this. Like like 50% of my head size is devoted to the hair. I think I just got to do something about it, you know? Oh, Jen.