Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the rapid development of the latest AI tools would see Meta replacing mid-level engineers with AI as early as this year.
And he’s now backing up that promise, at least in some capacity, with Meta today informing staff in its risk division that a number of them would be replaced with AI-powered tech.
As reported by Business Insider, Meta’s evolving AI tools have now reached the point where Meta is able to improve its efficiency, and remove some human roles.
As per BI:
“Meta's chief compliance and privacy officer of product, Michel Protti, informed workers in the risk org on Wednesday that it has been moving away from manual reviews to more automated processes. ‘As a result, we don't need as many roles in some areas as we once did,’ he wrote, without disclosing the number of affected roles.”
This comes just a day after Meta also announced that it will be cutting around 600 roles from its “Superintelligence Labs” project, which is focused on developing the next stage of AI.
Meta didn’t say that those roles will be replaced by AI tools, instead noting that the reduction in staff would help to streamline decision-making within the project. But presumably, some of these positions are also being replaced by generative AI processes, as Meta looks to increasingly become an AI-powered organization.
Which would be the best example of its own AI tech, and the capacity of its AI tools to cater to a broad range of applications and uses. The Superintelligence project is Meta’s big investment in building AGI, and AI tools that can actually “think” for themselves, which is part of its broader effort to be the leader of the global AI race, and optimize the company for future opportunities in this respect.
And you can imagine how many big corporations would be excited to hear that Meta’s replaced thousands of its own staff with its AI tools, that it can also offer to their organizations.
At the same time, Meta continues to spend big on AI development, via its new data center projects. This week, Meta also established a new joint venture partnership with Blue Owl Capital, which will provide additional funding opportunities for its AI investments.
Which suggests that Meta’s staff reductions are not so much cost-related (though reducing costs as it spends billions on data centers also makes sense), but are more focused on efficiency, and reducing decision-making bottlenecks, while also supporting the business with its own AI tools.
I guess, another concern on this front is reduced oversight, with fewer humans looking over its AI development, as Meta looks to advance its projects, without considering the broader potential impacts.
Though that’s a bigger concern for AI overall, that developers are so incentivized to become leaders in the AI race, that the potential for harm caused by AI tools is a secondary consideration, if a factor at all.
That could see us looking to regulate AI usage in retrospect, when the tools are already embedded, and the damage already done. That’s a larger concern in rolling out such tools so quickly, but it also seems inevitable that regulators aren't going to take any real action on addressing such till it’s too late.
It’s interesting to consider the broader implications of all of these aspects, and how Meta’s looking to build out its AI capacity, and show the world just how useful, and valuable, its AI tools can be.
The next step will likely be more cuts are Meta, as it seeks to replace more roles with AI, and pretty soon, a significant amount of Meta's product development will be fully automated.
But what does that mean for a company that has such significant influence over our daily informational input?
