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

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>> 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

>> [laughter]

>> 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.

>> [laughter]

>> 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.