Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says 'smart' employees used to train AI models in viral audio

Leaked audio by labour-focused media organisation More Perfect Union from an April 30 town hall reveals Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that its employees were used to train AI data. In the audio it Zuckerberg could be hard explaining that the company’s new artificial intelligence data tracking program was a way to “learn from watching really smart people do things.” The audio surfaced as Meta has begun laying off roughly 8,000 employees, 10 per cent of its workforce. In the recording, Zuckerberg defended a mandatory internal software program that logs employee keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen snapshots.

Zuckerberg explicitly told employees that the average intelligence of the Meta employees was “significantly higher” than that of the outside contractors typically hired for data labelling. “So if we’re trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model’s coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don’t have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company," said Zuckerberg. Meta did not spell out or clarified on the whole process because “this stuff is tricky” and “not strategically in your interest for us to communicate everything” so that competitors could not catch on.

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Meta has laid off 8,000 active positions and cancelled 6,000 open job roles in European and US offices, as the company is redirecting between $125 billion and $145 billion into AI infrastructure and data centres this year alone. Meta is further assigning 7,000 workers to four new organisations focused on developing AI tools. They will be moved to a new segment of the “AI native design structures” where the employee-to-manager ratio will be smaller than in other organisations.

The NYT earlier reported that employees were sceptical about the AI tracking program and expressed fear that they would unknowingly train models that would replace them. The tracking program known as the Model Capability Initiative runs across apps like Gmail, VSCode, and Meta’s internal assistant, Metamate. When employees asked how to opt out, Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth responded bluntly, "There is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop."