Sentiment within Meta is rapidly deteriorating as CEO Mark Zuckerberg shifts the company's strategic focus further toward generative AI and lays out his vision of creating a "personal superintelligence." Some employees bluntly said that senior management’s obsession with AI is sacrificing employees’ privacy, security and career prospects.
According to the New York Times, one of the triggers was a new surveillance program Meta recently announced internally. Last month, the company informed employees in an internal post that it would begin tracking what they typed on their computers, their mouse movements and what appeared on their screens. This project, called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), aims to collect data on how employees complete various computer tasks in real office scenarios to train Meta's AI system.
According to the company, this tracking will only be enabled when employees use certain pre-approved work apps, such as Gmail, Google Chat, VSCode, and Meta’s in-house AI assistant Metamate. However, as soon as the news came out, employees immediately expressed strong dissatisfaction internally. They generally believed that this was a serious violation of privacy, and asked whether the relevant tracking functions could be turned off. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth made it clear in response that "there is no opt-out option on your company laptop."
In response to external doubts, a Meta spokesperson told the New York Times that the company has set up security measures to protect sensitive content and that the data "will not be used for any other purpose." However, this statement did not dispel employees' concerns. Many employees worried that their every move would be recorded and eventually used to train an AI system that would replace them.
In addition to the surveillance controversy, Meta also plans to lay off about 8,000 people, accounting for about 10% of its overall workforce, starting on May 20, while eliminating more than 5,000 open recruitment positions. Zuckerberg attributed this round of "downsizing" to the efficiency improvements brought about by AI, believing that with the help of AI, a small team of 10 people can complete work that used to require larger manpower. Predictably, such statements and practices further dampened employee morale, especially those who had already begun complaining on the anonymous platform Blind that “management only sees AI.” Some employees said they were being forced to contribute to training "their successors."
While laying off employees and reducing positions, Meta has launched one of the most aggressive recruitment and investment operations in Silicon Valley in recent years in the field of AI. According to reports, the company continues to "poach" top AI researchers from competitors by offering salary packages of up to $300 million. Echoing this, Meta also recently announced plans to invest more than $600 billion by 2028 to build large-scale data center infrastructure adapted to AI workloads.
From the outside world, this “unprecedented AI sprint” may show Meta’s determination to catch up at all costs or even try to lead the new generation of AI technology wave. But for many internal employees, continued expansion of surveillance, intensifying pressure for layoffs, and a high concentration of resources on AI are causing their confidence in the future of the company and their personal careers to plummet. Some analysts pointed out that if this gamble around "personal superintelligence" continues to advance at the expense of employee experience, Meta may face increasingly severe challenges in terms of talent retention and corporate culture.