meta

Nobody would bet on Meta today in the superintelligence race, but he plays with more advantage than we think to win it

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A year ago, Zuckerberg was hiring AI talent like the world was ending, offering millionaire salaries and even buying entire companies to be able to sign Alexandr Wang. One year later, 8,000 people have been laid off, the work environment is unbreathable and We are still waiting for them to launch that great model with which to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic, all this while they spend money a lot. Despite everything, Meta has a real chance of closing positions and getting closer to the podium in the AI ​​race. The near future. In a complete report by Semianalysis They talk about how Meta is playing with better cards than it may seem. Muse Spark, its first language model, was somewhat disappointing, falling behind Chinese competitors such as Deepseek v4 Pro or Kimi K2.6. But the important thing is not where Meta is now, but where it can be in the near future thanks to the combination of three key elements: data, talent and computing. Record employees. It was a very controversial decision and, as expected, Meta employees were not amused. Without them being able to object, software was installed on the company computers that I recorded everything they didnot to spy on them, but to train their AI. This data is pure gold for training agents: Meta is accumulating thousands of examples of different people solving the same tasks, while data companies like Surge or Mercor have to partner with others to be able to record their workflows. Meta has the data at home. They say in Semianalysis that this decision is as if they had created a “top-tier startup for RL environments” within the company, with one of the founders of Scale AI leading the transformation. In addition, after the restructuring they have put at least 3,000 engineers on reinforcement learning environment tasks. All this data is key to being able to create programming agents like Claude Code or Codex from OpenAI. Data centers. It is one of the main sources of spending for Meta, which is building several gigantic data centers whose capacities are more than 1 gigawatt. Maybe Meta cannot compete in infrastructure with hyperscalers like GoogleMicrosoft and Amazon, but things change if we confront it with frontier AI laboratories. Here, Meta has a clear advantage and, according to Semianalysis’ projections, Meta will have more computing power than Anthropic and OpenAI combined before the end of the year. The talent. Last summer, Meta began signing talent with a checkbook. They hired at least 14 high-level researchers who came directly from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, paid $14 billion to keep Alexandr Wang and Scale AI. Bringing together the best does not ensure that the team will work and, in fact, for months now there have been rumors of internal tensions. Of course, if they make it work, they have the talent. keep focus. Meta may be in the rearview mirror of OpenAI and Anthropic sooner rather than later, but it is one thing to have the resources and quite another to achieve it. Meta is in a delicate moment internally, with many employees very dissatisfied with the company’s strategy. If they do not navigate these waves well, they risk becoming unfocused and lost along the way. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | Meta has a long history of privacy scandals. We can add one more to the list

Meta thought it was a good idea for its AI to generate images from your Instagram photos. Days later he has already turned back

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Last week Meta launched Muse Image and Muse Video, its new AI models integrated into the Meta AI app. However, the launch was quickly overshadowed by the criticism he received one of the functions of the image generator. Within Muse Image, in addition to writing the normal prompt, Meta thought it was a good idea to let us tag other Instagram users to Generate images from your photos. All you have to do is type the at sign with your username and Muse Image can access your profile to create any image you can think of. The problem with all this is that Meta activated it by default for all public Instagram accounts, without warning or of course asking for permission. If you wanted to prevent anyone from tagging youyou had to manually disable it from your account settings. Meta backs off: they will no longer be able to tag us in Muse Image Muse Image was announced last Tuesday, July 7, and in the following days the criticism of this decision began to accumulate. Four days later, on Saturday the 11th, Meta issued a statement in which They responded to the controversy. According to Meta, their intention with the tagging feature was to “offer a useful creative tool” and “give users control over whether their public content could be mentioned.” The best way to give control to users would have been to let us activate it if we wanted to be tagged and not the other way around. Meta has confirmed that The labeling function has been removed. This is the full statement: Earlier this week, we announced that one of the ways users can generate images in Meta AI is by @-tagging the public Instagram accounts they want to reference. Our intention was to offer a useful creative tool and give users control over whether their public content could be mentioned in this way. We’ve received feedback that this feature missed the mark and is no longer available. Image | Meta, edited with Magnific In Xataka | Meta has a long history of privacy scandals. We can add one more to the list

It’s not that a Meta data center consumes too much or too little water. It is contaminating it

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AI is quite unpopular among American citizens. According to a recent survey, the majority believe that it will have a negative impact on society. There is something in particular that has earned the rejection of a large part of the population: data centersand the truth is that they have no shortage of reasons. They pollute the airthey make raise the electricity bill and now they also contaminate the water with potentially deadly bacteria. what has happened. They count in Futurism that the authorities of Cheyenne, Wyoming, have prohibited all data centers from discharging any type of waste into the drinking water network. The reason is that Goat Systems LLC, a Meta contractor that is participating in the construction of a new data center, discharged water contaminated with Cupriavidus gilardii to the public sewage, a rare and very dangerous bacteria, especially for immunosuppressed people. The investigation. It’s not that anyone was monitoring the water quality at this particular data center, but rather that the bacteria was detected incidentally during routine testing for fecal contamination. “It’s not something we normally look at,” Frank Strong, head of the Cheyenne water agency’s engineering division, told local Wyoming News. The trail led them to the data center that Meta is building in the city, although Strong admits that they still do not know the exact origin of the pathogen within the facility. Consequences. As soon as the origin was determined, the authorities closed the facilities and stopped the discharge immediately. Additionally, as we said, they are revoking permissions so that other data centers can do the same. This means that they will not be able to do the process known as fill and flushwhereby they fill their cooling systems with water and then purge them before startup. Cupriavidus gilardii. It is an environmental bacteria that is found naturally in the soil. According to a study published in March of this year, is considered a opportunistic pathogen which rarely infects humans, but if it does it can cause death. To date, seven cases of death caused by Cupriavidus gilardii have been known and, at the moment, none have been recorded related to the spill from this data center. Meta’s response. In a public statement, a Meta spokesperson recalled that the bacteria had been found in wastewater, not public drinking water, and stated that it “immediately stopped discharging industrial wastewater and began transporting it outside the facilities.” However, the sewage system where the bacteria was located goes to a plant where wastewater is treated and then reused in public spaces such as parks, hence the authorities’ ban. What is clear is that the popularity of data centers in the US does not seem to be improving anytime soon. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | We already know how much water Amazon consumes in its data centers. We have good and bad news

Instagram and Facebook are “addictive” by design. And Meta faces a fine of 12 billion dollars

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The European Commission has concludedpreliminarily, that Meta violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) due to the “addictive” design of Instagram and Facebook. The organization and Meta have been arguing for years over a multitude of aspects related to the security and privacy of their social networks but, this time, the move could be very expensive for Mark Zuckerberg’s company, as it could be forced to redesign both applications and face a fine of up to $12 billion. por that. The conclusion of the European Commission comes after an investigation of more than two years which, if confirmed, would force Meta to change the internal functioning of two of the most used social networks on the planet. And it comes at a time when regulatory pressure on big technology companies for the protection of minors it doesn’t stop growingboth in Europe and in the United States. In detail. According to has explained The European Commission itself in an official statement, Meta “did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design for the physical and mental well-being of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.” The European organization points directly to several specific functions: Personalized recommendations. Autoplay (automatic playback of content). The infinite scroll. Push notifications. Brussels maintains that these tools push the user to continue viewing content almost unconsciously, which the institution itself describes as going into “autopilot mode.” It also ensures that Meta ignored available data on the time that minors spend on Instagram and Facebook at night, as well as the role that formats such as reels or stories could play in excessive or compulsive use of the applications. Between the lines. What is striking is not only that Brussels points out the design of the apps, but also questions the tools that Meta already offers to limit their use. The Commission states that screen time controls, even those enabled by default for teenagers, “can be easily dismissed” and do not truly reduce use of the service. Regarding parental control, consider that it only works if parents have technical knowledge and dedicate time and effort to configure it, something that, according to the organization itself, limits its real effectiveness. Nor does he consider the mental health warnings that Meta offers in its “safety center” as sufficient. With these arguments, the Commission proposes that Meta should introduce specific design changes: deactivate functions such as autoplay and infinite scroll by default, incorporate effective screen pauses and adjust its recommendation system so that it depends less on keeping the user engaged, according to the institution’s own statement. How much money is at stake. If the conclusion is confirmed, Meta could be fined up to 6% of its annual worldwide turnover. Taking 2025 revenues as a reference, close to $201 billion, the penalty could be close to $12 billion. That can make goal. It should be noted that these are still preliminary conclusions and that there is still no firm sanction. Meta has the right to defend himself, review the documentation in the file and respond in writing before Brussels adopts a final decision. In parallel, the case will be consulted to the European Committee for Digital Services. The context does not play in favor of Meta. This research It has been open since May 2024and it has not been the only one. In parallel, the company faces another European investigation into its age verification systems for children under 13 years of age, whose preliminary conclusions were published in April, as detailed by the Commission itself. In addition, Brussels is preparing a report, scheduled for next Monday, on a possible ban on the use of social networks for minors under 16 years of age throughout the community bloc, according to they count from The Verge. Pressure also comes from the United States. In August, Meta will sit on trial over whether its applications are intentionally addictive, in a case in which several states are jointly demanding compensation that could reach $1.4 trillion. depending on the medium. And it would not be the first judicial defeat, since in March, a Los Angeles jury already declared Instagram and YouTube responsible for damaging the mental health of a 20-year-old girl, in a case that forced the companies to pay 6 million dollars jointly, according to share from Bloomberg. QEU says the Comywentn. “Protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social media platforms,” ​​he said. declared Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy. Virkkunen added that the Digital Services Law “offers a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design of their services and their effects”, and assured that Brussels is “fully committed” to enforcing European regulations. What Meta says. A spokesperson for the technology giant declared to the BBC that the company did not agree with the conclusions, “which do not properly take into account the important measures we have taken to protect teenagers.” “We share the European Commission’s commitment to providing adolescents with safe and positive online experiences, and we will continue to engage constructively with them,” it continued. And now what. The case enters a phase of allegations that may be prolonged. This is not the first time that the DSA has resulted in sanctions, since the norm itself has already been used to fine X 120 million eurosand with 200 million euros to the Chinese e-commerce giant Temu. We’ll see what happens with Meta. Cover image | Guillaume Perigois and Goal In Xataka | Anyone can tag you on Instagram to generate AI deepfakes with your photos. It’s Meta being Meta

Meta just turned your Instagram photos into raw material for its AI without asking your permission: how to disable it

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Meta is not exactly known for being a company that takes care of the privacy of its users, rather the opposite. With their latest release they have made it even clearer if possible: an image generator in which Anyone can tag your Instagram account and generate deepfakes with your facelike the one you can see on these lines. The serious thing is that this option has been activated by default for all public Instagram accounts, without asking permission or warning anythingvery much like Meta. The only ones who are spared (for legal reasons, not ethical ones, don’t believe it) are those under 18 years old, but the rest of us have been put in the bag without asking. If you don’t want anyone to be able to create AI images with your photos, you have to disable it manually. How creating user images with Meta AI works Meta has launched Muse Image, its new image generator to compete with Nano Banana and ChatGPT Images. This generator lives inside the Meta AI app and, in addition to being able to generate images from nothing, you can also do it from the photos that people upload to Instagram. Left, an image generated with Meta AI from a user’s image. Right: What appears in Meta AI when the user has disabled that option If your account is public and you are over 18 years old, you can be tagged in Meta AI to create images, as you can see in the image on the left. It should be noted that the model has safeguards against creating sensitive contentso they will not be able to create nudes with your photos. What less. In the image on the right I tried to tag my account after deactivating this option and a message appears saying that you do not have permissions to access the photos. It is still possible for someone to download your images to create a new one from them, but as with any image that circulates on the internet. How to prevent Meta AI from using your Instagram photos If your account is private you will not have to do anything since it is excluded by default from Meta AI. However, if your account is public you have to disable the option manually. The steps to follow to deactivate it In your profile, click on the three lines button horizontal lines that appear in the upper right. Scroll to option “Share and reuse.” Here, there is a block called “Allow people to reuse your content on Instagram and with AI features” (for some reason, it came out in English) Uncheck the boxes for posts and Reels. Additionally, just below you have a box that allows you to limit other people from using the original audio from your Reels to create other videos and use it in Meta AI. Many people on social networks have criticized Meta’s decision to activate this by default for millions of accounts without asking permission or warning. In statements to New York Timesa company spokesperson recalled that it can be disabled “with just a couple of clicks” and that “We will take action against any content that violates our Community Guidelines.” Images | Xataka In Xataka | Meta shoehorned its AI chatbot into WhatsApp. Now Europe issues an order: they have five days to open themselves to rivals

Meta, Google and Microsoft will be able to continue tracking your messages until 2028. Despite the fact that the majority of the European Parliament voted against

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The European Parliament has once again given the green light for companies like Meta, Google or Microsoft to voluntarily track private conversations of its users looking for child sexual abuse material. The striking thing is that the decision is going to go ahead despite the fact that more MEPs have voted against it than in favor. What has happened? The European Chamber voted this Thursday on the extension of the so-called “ePrivacy exception”, a temporary rule that allows (but does not require) messaging platforms to scan chats, emails and social networks to detect already identified child abuse content. Although more deputies voted against this extension than in favor, the absolute majority of 361 votes necessary to overturn it has not been reached, so the rule remains in place until April 2028. Without absolute majority. Since this is a second reading, it is not enough for the “no” to win. It is necessary for 361 of the 720 MEPs to expressly vote against to block the regulations. If that number is not reached, the proposal goes ahead by default, even if the votes in favor are fewer than the votes against. It’s just what has happened. In detail. The original text, approved in 2021, had expired on April 3 after the European Parliament refused to extend it by 311 votes to 228, with 92 abstentions, according to collect Brussels Signal. To revive the proposal, the European People’s Party (EPP) resorted to an unusual emergency procedure, also promoted by the President of Parliament, Roberta Metsola, and by national governments. This shortcut has allowed the text to be voted on again in the last session before the summer, precisely when many parliamentarians are no longer present during these dates, according to explains the German medium Heise. The rejection proposal was 47 votes short of the necessary absolute majority. Before that final vote, MEPs have managed to approve two amendments that expressly exclude services with end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp or Signal, from being traced, as confirm Euronews. These amendments passed with 369 and 362 votes respectively. Between the lines. A good part of the social democratic group, including German MEP Birgit Sippel (the rapporteur on the file), voted in favor of limiting the scope of the rule, according to Euronews. However, that same group had previously facilitated the approval of the emergency procedure that made the entire maneuver possible, something that Heise describelike a previous transfer that has ended up playing against its own intentions. The European Commission has also actively lobbied, as four commissioners sent a last-minute letter warning of a legal loophole if the mechanism was not extended, according to collect Heise. The vice president of the EPP, Tomas Tobé, has defended that summer could not be reached “without tools to protect minors.” The critical voices. Simeon de Brouwer, advisor to the digital rights organization European Digital Rights, countedWired that the standard opens the door for companies to review, if they so choose, any message, email or image that a user shares. On the other hand, activist and former MEP Patrick Breyer has described the result as a “farce” that damages democracy, and has pointed out in a statement collected by Brussels Signal that the real losers of this process are the minors themselves. Breyer points to the European Commission’s own figures, indicating that mass scanning of private chats has only accounted for 36% of abuse reports in 2024. The majority came from public posts and cloud storage services. On the other hand, the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) warns that 48% of the alerts generated lack criminal relevance, and that 40% of the resulting investigations end up pointing to minors. Furthermore, according to they point From Brussels Signal, 99% of the reports that Meta sends under this mechanism correspond to material already known previously, which provides little value in the face of cases of active abuse. From Heise they mention also to cybersecurity researchers who have warned in open letters of the high error rates of automated scanning systems based on AI, which would put the privacy of users at risk without any connection with crimes. And now what. This vote only extends the current system, which is temporary and not mandatory, since companies can scan messages if they want, but they do not have to do so by law. The permanent and much stricter regulations (known as Chat Control 2.0and which would require a widespread scan) is still being negotiated separately and has not yet been approved. Meanwhile, companies like Meta, Google or Microsoft will be able to continue scanning messages, emails and photos of their users until 2028, with the only exception of end-to-end encrypted conversations, such as those on WhatsApp or Signal. Cover image | Wikipedia, Pexels In Xataka | The camera that watches you while you drive is already mandatory in new cars. And no one guarantees what happens with that data.

Meta moves to the other side of the AI ​​counter. You are going from buying computing to selling it

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Meta is designing a cloud computing business to sell excess capacity in its AI data centers to third parties, it has been reported. advanced Bloomberg. The company values ​​two ways: Offer access to models hosted on your infrastructure. Or rent computing power directly, in the style of neoclouds. The panoramic. Zuckerberg has been hinting at this move for some time. At the May shareholders meeting he said that competing in cloud was “definitely on the table” and that there were companies asking him “almost every week” if they could buy computing from him. Now that balloon probe is a business plan. The service would include access to Muse SparkMeta’s own model that still does not have a release date for external developers. Renting raw GPU power is also being studied, the business model of CoreWeave and Nebius. Why is it important. Meta has built, between 2023 and 2026, one of the largest computing infrastructures in the world almost alone, without external partners or clients to make it profitable. 98% of its income still comes from advertising. Turning those data centers into a product that is sold, and not just an assumed cost, is the first public sign that Meta needs another source of income to justify the outlay. In figures: Goal has risen to 145,000 million dollars its infrastructure spending forecast for 2026, 10 billion more than expected in January. Your actions They have risen more than 9% After hearing the news, their best session in more than five months, although they have had a subsequent correction. Meta’s gross margin is 82%, and the operating margin is 41%. The business of cloud Google, on the other hand, operates with a margin of 18%, compared to 42% for its advertising division. CoreWeave is down 10.8% and Nebius 12.4% on the stock market, due to the fear of losing Meta as a client and gaining it as a competitor. Between the lines. The clearest parallel is with SpaceX. Musk’s company, owner of xAI, has begun renting capacity in its data centers to Google and Anthropic for more than $2 billion per month between the two companies. Both companies share a pattern: they have trained LLMs own without getting the market to adopt them en masse, and now they monetize what is left over instead of what they produce. The contrast. Google is the mirror in which Meta looks, and it is not a pretty mirror. He launched his business cloud in 2008, made it public in 2011 and It did not give benefits until 2023. Fifteen years for the calculation to give money. Meta would have to build from scratch a sales and technical support team that it does not have today, something very different from selling advertising space in an automated way as it has been doing. Yes, but. It is not something that should be interpreted solely as a sign of weakness. If you are going to build capacity anyway, it is rational not to leave it idle but to turn it into an asset. Zuckerberg himself framed it this way in May, when he explained that domestic demand had so far absorbed all available capacity. Not anymore. And now what. The question that remains on the table is which side Meta wants to be on: the one that competes to build the best model, or the one that sells infrastructure to those who can achieve it. A few months ago, Google cut off access to Gemini due to lack of capacity and forced Meta to ration its consumption. tokens among its own employees. Selling computing today also means stopping depending on others to sell to it. In Xataka | Sharing your ChatGPT or Claude password is not like sharing your Netflix password: there are people learning it the hard way Featured image | Xataka

Google has had to ration access to Gemini to Meta and more customers

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That computing power is one of the bottlenecks of the AI ​​industry is obvious. From this problem arises the insane investment in data centers and, consequently, the DRAM memory crisis. It is one thing if they are OpenAI or Anthropic those with capacity problemsthe serious thing is when the one who has them is Google. This is exactly what is happening and the main victim is Meta. Google turns off the tap. They tell it in Financial Times. Google has had to limit the use of Gemini due to the enormous demand from its clients, especially one in particular: Meta. Zuckerberg’s people had requested to buy more processing capacity from them, but Google could not satisfy it, so it had to reject the request. This has caused several projects within Meta to be delayed and the company to ask employees to begin relaxing the use of tokens. Why it is important. Google is not just any tech company, it is a hyperscaler. It has an infrastructure that allows it to offer cloud services to thousands of customers on a massive scale. That the shortage is affecting them to the point of limiting a large customer like Meta reveals that even spending hundreds of billions in chips, data centers and energy, is not being enough to meet the demand for AI. Meta dependency. Although also They are developing their own AI modelssources consulted by the Financial Times affirm that Gemini offered better performance than the Llama de Meta models. The company was using Gemini for moderation tasks such as fraud detection and sensitive content, as well as customer service, advertising support chatbots, and scheduling tasks. Zuckerberg’s company also is spending a fortune in AI infrastructure to become more independent, including building a data center as big as the island of Manhattan. However, they do not have a cloud business like Google has with Google Cloud, Amazon with AWS or Microsoft with Azure. The business is in the cloud. Doubts about the profitability of AI continue to hover over the environment, but in the meantime there is a business that has proven to be the real goose that lays the golden eggs: the cloud. While OpenAI loses money a lotGoogle, Microsoft and Amazon are the winners of the AI ​​boom. Google posted record revenue in the first quarter of the year, with Google Cloud bringing in a whopping $20 billion, up 63% from last year. Sundar Pichai already warned that the figure would have been much higher if it were not for the fact that they are limited by the calculation. In fact, this same month we learned the news that Google will pay $920 million a month to SpaceX to lend it its infrastructure. In other words: the data center party is not going to stop and, as a result, neither will the RAM crisis. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | Google is the big technology company that is doing the best thanks to AI: so it is going to spend another million

We believed that Meta would have learned his lesson after his privacy scandals. We were totally wrong

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The internal environment in Meta is not at its best. Workers who do not have been fired were relocated to a new AI department described as “the gulag”. Additionally, the company recently installed software on workers’ computers that recorded everything they did. Well, they had to pause it because there was a leak that left the data exposed. what has happened. They tell it in Wired. Meta has had to pause its employee tracking program due to an internal leak. The program, called Model Capability Initiative or MCI, was launched in April and was installed on all company computers. This software recorded screen content, keystrokes and clicks. It was not to control employees (or not only for that), but to train AI agents who, presumably, will one day replace them. As expected, employees were not amused, nor were they amused that a security issue left their data exposed to other workers. The reaction. The notice came from an employee who detected that he could access the MCI data of other employees. According to Meta, the bug was solved in four hours, although the first solution was not permanent and they had to reinforce the data access block. During those hours, employees, who had already expressed their discontent with this program, filled the internal forums with criticism and Meta finally suspended the program. But be careful because it is not goodbye, but see you later. Speaking to Wired, AI research vice president Stephan Kasriel said that “we will reactivate MCI when we are confident in the effectiveness of our data protection controls.” And now they go… The case adds to Meta’s long history with leaks and privacy issues. The clearest and most resounding was the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, but there have been many morelike the massive data theft which affected a whopping 533 million users in 2021 or the use of facial recognition without permission in 2024. We recently learned that Meta’s glasses record even when we take them offmeaning contractors in Kenya have seen users having sex, going to the bathroom or accessing their bank accounts. This questionable way of treating its users’ data and repeated scandals have earned the company a reputation for being unreliable when it comes to privacy. We now know that even employees themselves are vulnerable to this. Fed up employees. As we said, to the employees They were not happy that the company installed this software on their computers. In fact, at least 1,600 employees had signed a petition in which, in addition to describing the program as invasive, they warned that it posed a risk from a security point of view. All this was happening at a time when Meta had announced layoffs, but had not yet communicated who those affected were. For a month, the staff worked without knowing if they were going to be fired, but the anguish did not end with the “execution.” Meta laid off more than 8,000 employees and relocated another 7,000, who now work in the Applied AI department. Many high-level engineers have ended up here and describe the work as mechanical and uncreative. Now, in addition, they leak their private data from the program they were using to control them. It is not surprising that the internal environment is going through its lowest hours. Image | Xataka with ChatGPT In Xataka | Soon you won’t need to remember anyone’s name. Meta’s glasses will do it for you

a Meta employee interrupts a meeting and summarizes pretty well how things are inside

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At the end of May, Meta made the biggest restructuring in its history: 8,000 employees were laid off and 7,000 were relocated to new departments. The internal leaks paint a rather unbearable atmosphere: the teams’ morale is at rock bottom and the unrest is widespread. In this context, an employee couldn’t take it anymore and exploded. what has happened. They tell it in Wired. During an internal presentation involving thousands of employees, one of them opened his microphone and said exactly what he thought, without filters. She declared that she felt like “the company’s bitch” and asked whoever had organized the call to tell a Meta executive that “he’s a piece of shit.” Details about who the angry executive or employee were have not emerged, but it is known that he was part of a new team called Applied AI, which some employees refer to as “the gulag.” Applied AI. Of the 7,000 people relocated, at least 6,500 have ended up here. Their job is to support the superintelligence department, where all the AI ​​galactics work that Zuckerberg signed last year. Wired has spoken with several of these employees who criticize that their work has become mechanical, uncreative and demoralizing. The majority of employees in this new department were engineers or product managers who were dedicated to software development, but now they have to create puzzles and problems for an AI to solve. Those chosen to enter this unit could not choose to go to another department: they either accepted the new position or they went out with the rest. In an internal memo, Zuckerberg himself tried to calm things down, suggesting that it was temporary: “The work is essential to the advancement of our models and allows very talented people to contribute to those efforts, while we create other positions in which they can contribute their bit at Meta in the coming months.” There is more. A month has passed since the layoffs were announced. A month in which employees did not know if they were going to end up on the street or not. As if that were not enough, at that time Meta made a very controversial decision: started monitoring everything employees did on their computers. The company installed a program that recorded clicks and took screenshots periodically, but not to control them (or not only for that), but so that its AI learns to perform everyday tasks. More than 1,600 employees signed a petition to have this program removed, but were only able to be allowed to pause data collection for 30 minutes. Something is something. The hackathon. The CEO of Meta is aware of the discontent among the staff, so he has had an idea to raise spirits: hold a hackathon next July that will be focused on “innovation in AI.” It seems that the only one in the mood for celebrations is Zuckerberg, because according to Wired The employees couldn’t have taken it worse. At a time when the company has given them more workload and is requiring them to be at 100%, many workers do not have time and believe that a hackathon is very disconnected from reality. Additionally, they are concerned that what they do during the event will not count toward performance evaluations, so they have no incentive to participate. It will take more than celebrations for the good atmosphere to return to Meta. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | Soon you won’t need to remember anyone’s name. Meta’s glasses will do it for you

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