meta

Meta employees have not known for weeks if they are going to be fired. Meanwhile, the company records everything they do on the computer

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Meta is one of the companies that is betting the most on AI. Zuckerberg’s company is investing massively in the development of new data centers and critical AI technologies. And in the midst of this transformation, your employees find themselves vulnerable to mass layoffs, surveillance, and pressure to embrace the technology that could replace them. What exactly is happening. Meta has told its employees in the United States that it will record what they type on their keyboard, how they move their mouse, where they click, and what appears on their screen. The tool, internally called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), runs in the background on corporate computers and also takes periodic screenshots, according to counted Reuters, which had access to the internal memos. The company’s stated objective is to train its AI models so that they learn to perform everyday tasks on a computer in the same way that their employees do. Reaction. When the company announced the measure, hundreds of workers responded on internal channels, mainly asking how they could disable tracking. Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer at Meta, affirms That option does not exist on business laptops. However, that has not calmed the reaction of its employees. And it is that according to account In the New York Times, one employee even wrote to him directly: “Your insensitivity to the concerns of your own workers is troubling.” And all while they don’t know if they are going to be fired. Two days after announcing the tracking system, Meta confirmed which will lay off approximately 8,000 people on May 20, which represents around 10% of its global workforce. According to NYTwho spoke with several of his employees, many workers have been in a state of uncertainty for weeks. Some admit to being looking for work elsewhere. Others directly try to give signals that they want to be included in the layoffs to collect compensation. “It’s tremendously demoralizing,” wrote one of the users in an internal message to which the media had access. What Meta says. The company insists that the data collected is not used to evaluate employee performance or for any purpose other than training AI models. “If we are building agents to help people complete everyday tasks on computers, our models need real examples of how people use them,” explained a company spokesperson told the BBC. Meta also states that there are safeguards to protect sensitive content, although without specifying which ones. What employees say. The story is different from within. A worker who preferred not to be identified described the situation is described as “very dystopian”: knowing that every small action you perform on the computer is being recorded, just when the company is announcing layoffs, generates a feeling that is difficult to ignore. Another former employee said that it is “the last way they shove AI down your throat.” Legislation. In the United States there is no federal law that limits this type of workplace surveillance, as long as employees are informed of it, according to explained told Reuters Ifeoma Ajunwa, a law professor at Yale University. The situation is radically different in Europe, since Valerio De Stefano, a professor at the University of York specialized in labor law and technology, counted to the same means that this practice would probably violate the General Data Protection Regulation European. In countries like Italy, tracking productivity through electronic means is outright prohibited; In Germany, courts only allow keystroke recording in exceptional circumstances, such as suspicion of a serious crime. In Spain it would also be a very difficult measure to justify, and would directly clash with the RGPD. AI, at the center of everything. Beyond monitoring, Meta has been reorganizing its internal structure around artificial intelligence for months. It has organized mandatory training weeks for employees to learn how to use AI agents, introduced internal dashboards that measure consumption of tokens (the minimum unit of AI that measures its consumption) to foster competition between workers, and is creating a new generic professional profile called AI builder that replaces more specialized roles. And now what. May 20 is the date proposed by Meta to announce another wave of mass layoffs. Until then, thousands of the company’s employees live with the uncertainty of whether they will remain with the company, while also tracking their activity. Meta’s CFO, Susan Li, admitted during a call with investors that the company “really doesn’t know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future.” A phrase that is probably not reassuring for those who expect news on May 20. Cover image | Compagnons and Goal In Xataka | The Musk-Altman trial is giving the spectacle it promised: a soap opera of dirty laundry in which no one comes out well

Meta and Google talk about nuclear fusion for the future; The short-term reality is that they are pulling natural gas

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Silicon Valley has an undeniable gift for selling the future. If one listens to the great technological leaders, Artificial Intelligence will soon be powered by energy sources worthy of a science fiction novel. Goal just signed an agreement to obtain solar energy directly from satellites in space, while figures such as Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, They assure that nuclear fusion It is the great “silver bullet” that will save the sector. However, it is enough to look down from the stars to the earth to find a much smokier reality. To feed the insatiable “energy monster” that AI has unleashed, big technology companies are turning to the technology of the past. As explained from Axiosthe race to dominate artificial intelligence is accelerating at such a dizzying pace that the industry’s ambitious climate goals are taking a discreet backseat. Today, the world’s most sophisticated cloud is being built on a foundation of fossil fuels. The numbers speak for themselves. Far from nuclear fusion laboratories, the actual infrastructure being built in the United States tells a story based on natural gas. Meta’s case is perhaps the most graphic, as detailed in Bloomberg, US utility Entergy Corp. has had to increase its capital spending plan by almost a third, reaching $57 billion, to build 10 new natural gas plants dedicated exclusively to powering the new data campus Hyperion of Meta in Louisiana. This gigantic complex will require more than 7 gigawatts of power, the equivalent of the output of seven large nuclear reactors. Google, the historic champion of clean energy, is not far behind either. An investigation by the market intelligence firm Cleanview has brought to light Google’s partnership with the company Crusoe Energy to develop a huge data center in Texas named “good night“. The project includes a 933-megawatt gas plant built outside the traditional electrical grid. The end of the green utopia? The environmental impact of this installation is not minor, how to explain Guardianthe plant will emit up to 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. To put it in perspective, this exceeds the annual emissions of the entire city of San Francisco or is equivalent to putting 970,000 additional gasoline cars on the roads. Given this, Google’s official position is cautious. Chrissy Moy, company spokesperson, does not deny the project before the mediaalthough it clarifies that, although they are linked to the campus, they still “do not have a contract in force” to acquire energy from said gas plant. How have they developed in oil pricethe origin of this sudden gas rush is that data centers are putting local power grids under unprecedented pressure, causing consumers to bear the cost of this increased energy competition. To overcome the slow expansions of the public network and the endless waiting lists for permits, Wired points out that data center developers They are choosing to generate their own energy “behind the meter” (off-grid). And in that fast and private strategy, gas is king. Their green mask falls off. This is a serious blow to Silicon Valley’s green image. As you remember GuardianGoogle was once a pioneer in promising net zero emissions by 2030. However, the company itself has had to admit that its carbon emissions have increased by 48% in the last five years due to data centers. Now, those environmental objectives have been internally downgraded to the category of climate moonshots (speculative projects very difficult to achieve). The underlying problem is purely physical. As he reflects Impakterenergy—not chip shortages—is emerging as the real bottleneck for AI. Traditional renewable sources are intermittent, and large language models require devouring electricity 24 hours a day. A systemic problem that is already raising blisters in Washington. The return to natural gas is not an isolated anecdote of a couple of companies. There are currently about 100 gigawatts of gas-fired power in development in the United States destined for data centers alone. Microsoft just signed a deal with oil giant Chevron in Texas, and permits for OpenAI’s Project Jupiter in New Mexico suggest it could emit up to 14 million tons of greenhouse gases annually (triple that of Google’s project). Faced with this fossil avalanche, Democratic senators such as Whitehouse, Van Hollen and Heinrich have sent letters demanding formal explanations from leaders of Meta and OpenAI for putting the country’s climate commitments at risk. The industry defends itself by arguing that it is a necessary evil. Cully Cavness, president of Crusoe, explained that natural gas it is a critical “bridge” and the only power source available today capable of scaling at the pace AI demands. Next-generation clean alternatives will take decades. Meta’s promising agreement to receive solar energy from space will not have a pilot satellite until 2028and its commercial viability is not expected, at best, until the 2030s or 2040s. The same happens with commercial fusion reactors: they will not dump a single watt into the grid well into the next decade. The great paradox of AI. Business magazines celebrate the financial success of this revolution. In their profiles of the most influential companies, TIME relates how Google, under Sundar Pichai, has reached a $4 trillion market value driven by its advances in AI, while Mark Zuckerberg celebrates record ad revenue on Meta by promising systems that will soon “understand the unique personal goals” of each user. Silicon Valley promises that this same Artificial Intelligence will one day help us solve humanity’s great challenges, including climate change itself. But the current paradox is inescapable: in the real world of 2026, to train the most brilliant and avant-garde artificial mind ever created, human beings still inevitably need to set natural gas on fire. Image | Photo by Tasos Mansour on Unsplash Xataka | Solving the mystery of the red balls on high-voltage cables: a simple way to save lives

Meta plans to cut 10% of its workforce in May. Its employees have been surviving a “28-day hell” for weeks

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When last week the news was leaked that Meta was going to lay off 10% of its staff (again), the company had no choice but to make its decision public through a statement before I’m ready for it. The director of human resources, Janella Gale, acknowledged the leak and confirmed what many already feared: around 10% of the workforce will receive their dismissal notice. next May 20. The problem is that no one knows yet which profiles or departments will be fired. As the employees themselves said, this wait is precisely what is hurting them the most. There is a date marked on the calendar, there are figures on the table (about 7,800 positions eliminated plus another 6,000 that will be left uncovered), but there are no names. And in that void, thousands of employees have been trying to work normally for weeks without knowing if they will continue to occupy that table next month. Four weeks in limbo. “Welcome to the 28 days of hell.” This is how a Meta employee summed up the situation in an internal forum, and the expression quickly spread through the company’s internal communication channels. As and as detailed Business Insiderthat same uncertainty is breathed in the publications of the employees in the Blind app, where anguish, black humor and unanswered questions are mixed about what criteria will determine who stays and who leaves. In Blindan employee asked how to find motivation to work during the next few weeks knowing that layoffs are a fact and we can only wait for the names to be given to make them effective. One response summed up the general mood: “I’m getting motivated to do things that I can put on my resume for my next job,” said a Meta employee. In Meta’s own internal forums, others claimed to be focused on demonstrating results quickly, before D-day arrives, in an attempt desperate to avoid dismissal. A state of anxiety that has already lasted since 2022. For many Meta workers, this round of layoffs is not an isolated surprise. Since 2022, the company has gone through several waves of cuts, and that has left its mark on the employees who kept their jobs when thousands (hundreds of thousands, actually) of colleagues were falling into the different rounds of dismissal that Meta has applied since 2022. One employee admitted to feeling more anguish about the possibility of surviving layoffs than about being fired, because those who stay know that they will have to take on a greater workload in an increasingly pressured company. This phenomenon, called survivor syndrome, It is more common than it seems and is fueled by that uncertainty of someone who faces a situation that they know and that they know will get worse, and that perhaps they will fall into the next round of layoffs. In fact, according to some comments in that application, some employees admit to having mentally disconnected from work, and there are even those who are considering maneuvering to be included on the layoff list and thus collect compensation. AI as a background to the cut. Another factor that contributes to undermining the morale of employees who must deal with “their 28-day hell” is that, in reality, these dismissals do not occur because they are doing their job poorly or because of the company’s financial problems, but rather because of a strategic bet that puts the AI as an absolute priority for the company. If there is only one dollar to spend, that dollar will be invested in AI. “We are doing this as part of our continuous effort to manage the company more efficiently and to compensate for the other investments we are making,” said Meta’s human resources manager in her statement. Goal plans to allocate between $115 billion and $135 billion in capital investment this year alone, double the capital that he destined in 2024 to this end, with artificial intelligence as the main destination of money. Mark Zuckerberg has been making it clear for months that AI is the absolute priority of the company, which leaves positions that are not aligned with the development of that technology in an increasingly complicated position. What awaits those who are fired. Meta cuts come at the same time as Microsoft announces early retirements volunteers for the first time in its 51-year history. This new strategy is raising alarm bells about whether AI-powered automation is starting to cause a structural labor crisis in the technology sector. According to the company’s statement, Meta employees who finally receive their dismissal letter on May 20 will receive compensation of 16 weeks of base salary plus two additional weeks for each year worked in the company. “We will also cover the cost of COBRA health insurance for US employees and their families for 18 months. Packages outside the United States will be similar, but will vary by country, as will local deadlines and processes,” states the internal Meta statement signed by Gale. In Xataka | “They blame AI for layoffs they would do anyway”: Sam Altman confirms that AI has been used as an excuse to lay off Image | Unsplash (Mariia Shalabaieva, Arif Riyanto)

Meta has signed an agreement to search for it in space

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Back in 1941, Isaac Asimov already played with an idea that for decades sounded more like literature than infrastructure: capture solar energy in space and send her back to Earth. It was not a minor occurrence. Basically, it posed a question that today no longer belongs only to science fiction: what do we do when the energy available down here is not enough to sustain what we want to build. More than eighty years later, that question has found a new protagonist: artificial intelligence. What we have seen in recent years is a race to build AI infrastructure at enormous speed. More models, more servers, more data centers and, as a direct consequence, more need for stable electricity. Meta places the problem there: current clean sources help, but have obvious limitations when looking for continuous supply. Solar doesn’t produce at night, the wind doesn’t always blow, and the grid needs storage to turn that intermittent energy into a more reliable basis for its operations. The energy that AI is pushing beyond Earth The Meta movement arrives in the form of two agreements who attack the problem from different sides. The first is with Overview Energy, a startup with which Meta has reserved until 1 GW capacity of orbital solar power to support the company’s data center operations. The second is with Noon Energy, with whom Meta has reserved up to 1 GW/100 GWh of very long duration storage capacity. The idea is not to replace one technology with another, but to combine generation and storage to get closer to a more continuous supply. Overview Energy’s proposal is based on a premise that is simple to tell, although difficult to execute. Its satellites would be in geostationary orbit above the Earth’s equator, where sunlight is constant. From there they would capture energy and send it to existing solar installations on Earth as low-intensity near-infrared light. According to Meta, these plants would convert the beam into electricity and inject it into the grid just as they do today with direct sunlight, also during the hours in which they now remain inactive. Capture of a video about the project shared by Meta It’s a good idea to put things in perspective. The company itself places this technology in an early phase: Overview plans a orbital demonstration in 2028when your system should try to send power wirelessly from space to a solar plant on Earth for the first time. If successful, commercial delivery to the US grid could begin, at the earliest, in 2030. In between, the most difficult part remains: proving that the system works, that it scales, and that it can do so in an economic sense. Noon Energy Energy Storage System The second alliance looks at a less striking, but equally important problem: what happens when clean energy has already been generated and needs to be conserved for longer. Noon Energy works with reversible solid oxide fuel cells and carbon-based storage to offer more than 100 hours of storage, well above what Meta says lithium-ion batteries can offer today. These two alliances fit into a much broader energy strategy. Meta assures that it has already contracted more than 30 GW of clean and renewable energyand places these agreements alongside its next-generation geothermal projects with Sage Geosystems and XGS Energy, in addition to 7.7 GW of nuclear energy linked to Vistra, TerraPower, Oklo and Constellation Energy. What remains is a fairly clear snapshot of the moment: AI is not only pushing technology companies to buy more chips, it is also forcing them to look for electricity in increasingly unconventional places. Images | Xataka with Grok In Xataka | Kimi Code is eight times cheaper than Claude Code and does 75% of your work. The question is whether it is enough

Meta spent 2 billion on a Chinese AI startup. China is clear that it was a conspiracy

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With China and the United States dancing the dance of artificial intelligenceboth countries and companies want to get the best cards for their decks. Meta is investing millions in the development of AI and, even so, it seems to be lagging behind. To turn the tables, he closed 2025 with a $2 billion purchase: that of a Chinese startup called Manus. The operation was so notorious that the Chinese government itself raised an eyebrow and undertook an investigation to see what was happening there. And they are already clear. It was a conspiracy. The Manus case. Although it has rained a lot and these last few months in China AI companies have come out from under the stones, during the first half of 2025 the proper name was that of deepseek. It was the great competition from the Western OpenAI or Google Gemini, but in March something that looked like an AI agent began to appear: Manus. That’s how they sold italthough it was really a deep investigation mode that helps you perform actions, but does not do them for you. It didn’t matter: the expectation was there and, although there were doubts about his behavior and limits, Manus began to move a lot of money (more than 100 million in estimated income) and attract attention from the big players. One of them was Meta, who took over the company. The purchase. A good question is how China let something like this slip away for a technological and strategic rival to buy. And it’s a good question, but the answer is that, at some point, Manus stopped being a Chinese startup. In the middle of last year, Manus moved to Singapore, allowing the company to bypass export and import controls imposed on China. To the not having your own LLMthey depended on others like Claude which they could more easily access from outside China. This already set off alarm bells in the Government, but with the purchase of Meta the bells echoed. China put to work to various organizations to see what was really happening, the largest of them being the Chinese National Security Commission, which is commanded by President Xi Jinping himself. The reports prepared by this body are directly supervised by the leaders of the Communist Party, so it is a voice that must be taken into account. Conspiracy. And the result of the investigation is clear. As they comment in Financial Timesthe conclusion is that Meta’s acquisition of Manus is a conspiratorial attempt to try to undermine China’s technological capabilities. These are big words that do not remain in a vacuum, since the founders of Manus – Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao – were summoned by the NDRC last March to address issues such as possible violations of foreign investment rules in China. He did not stay for a meeting and, as the FT points out, both have been prohibited from leaving the country during the review process. In fact, there are sources that suggest that Manus would be considering backing out of the agreement, but even so, it is not clear that the Chinese authorities will be satisfied. For his part, Meta points out that they did everything according to the law and it seems that he has already started to integrate Manus systems into their tools, so taking that step back would be very complex. And now… what. That the National Security Commission has classified the case as “conspiracy” is something serious, since it was the trigger for a broader review that involves more agencies in the country that are currently reviewing everything. And the underlying problem is the speed with which everything happened. Manus took off and, just four months later, they moved everything to Singapore to break away from China just before the purchase of an American company. The investigation is shaking the Chinese technology sector because it is not the first time something like this has happened. Although on a smaller scale, it is an operation called ‘Singapore washing’ in which startups founded by Chinese move to the city-state to bypass China’s control and have a more direct line with the United States. The problem is that, at a time when the commercial and strategic war has intensified, calling the Manus case a “conspiracy” sets a precedent. One in which it is stated that China does not want to let artificial intelligence talent and technology escape because this advance has become one of the country’s strategic legs for the next five years. We will see what happens when the case is resolved, but it is clear that Beijing’s objective, like Washington’s, is to prevent its assets from escaping, and Manus can be the example for national technology companies do not follow a similar model in the future. In Xataka | We don’t know if “crisis” means “opportunity” in China, but there is one business where it does: RAM memory

Meta will surpass Google in digital advertising for the first time in history

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That Google is the queen of online advertising is one of the great constants of the Internet, but everything indicates that the reign is approaching its end. If the predictions come true, for the first time in history, Meta will be the company that generates the most advertising revenue. Projections. At the moment the surprise has not occurred, but the projections of the advertising analysis firm Emarketer are clear: Meta is going to snatch the throne of online advertising from Google in 2026. Specifically, they project that Meta will earn 243.46 billion dollars from advertising, while Google will earn 239.54 billion. Why is it important. Google’s dominance in the online advertising market was absolute. In fact, that domain has been in the regulators’ crosshairs for years and It has become very expensive for Google. Meta’s surprise, although not by a huge difference, is confirmation that the internet has been reconfigured with social networks and that the cake is much more distributed. Considering that Google has built its empire on the foundation of online advertising, it is even more relevant. The Meta Boost: AI. Meta has a portfolio of products with millions of users such as Instagram, Facebook, Threads and WhatsApp. According to Emarketer, the company has been “incredibly patient” in building solid usage habits in its user base before introducing ads. But what has caused this acceleration has been the integration of AI in content recommendation systems. This has allowed them to increase the viewing time of Reels by 30%, which translates into more advertising and therefore more income, specifically they are expected to reach the 50,000 million only with Reels. Goal Advantage+. It is the suite with AI that Meta offers advertisers. In addition to offering the platform to advertise, Meta also provides a ton of tools ranging from advertising actions to the creation of the ads themselves with generative audio, text and video AI. According to the brand’s results, revenue from video generation reached $10 billion in the last quarter of 2025. It was seen coming. It is not something that happened overnight, but rather The change has been in the works for years.. The displacement of searches was moving to other specialized platforms such as Amazon, Instagram or TikTok. With the emergence of AI, the landscape has become even more fragmented: with chatbots that provide answers to many user queries without us going through the classic search engine. Google is no longer the ‘default’ when doing a search, especially for younger generations who prefer audiovisual content. OpenAI enters the business. A few days ago we talked about OpenAI’s ambitious plans for its newly launched advertising business. The company hopes that, by 2030, they will have generated $100 billion with ads on ChatGPT, that’s nothing. It is still a much smaller amount than those managed by Meta or Google in a year, but it is enough for the impact to be noticeable. With social networks the exodus of searches began and perhaps we are facing the second great displacement. Time will tell. Image | Xataka, with Gemini In Xataka | The US has just opened a new wound in the Google empire: the justice system declares part of its advertising business illegal

The US has appointed executives of Meta, Palantir and OpenAI as lieutenant colonels. We have many questions

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On June 13, 2025, four executives from some of the world’s largest technology companies donned the uniform of the United States Army at Myer-Henderson Barracks, a ten-minute drive from the Pentagon. After taking the oath, They were appointed lieutenant colonels of the Reserve. The appointment was controversial, but it was made on the occasion of the launch of Detachment 201, a very special army body dedicated exclusively to military innovation. Technological military with a wink. The four new reserve lieutenant colonels are Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta, Kevin Weil, CPO of OpenAI and Bob McGrew, advisor to Thinking Machines Labs (Mira Murati’s startup) and former head of research at OpenAI. The name of Detachment 201 is a wink to Silicon Valley, because an HTTP 201 status code on the web means that a resource was successfully created. All four will continue in their current positions while serving as reservists. Sankar’s thesis. Palantir’s CTO has already become a reference in the discourse on how to apply technology to military institutions after publishing on its website 18theses.com the document “Defense reform”. In it he talked about how “warriors fight with weapons and with git.” He criticized the Department of Defense (DoD) for treating technology as “expensive and unaffordable,” and proposed using AI to make military assets work more efficiently and quickly. The germ. The project was conceived by Brynt Oameter, who was responsible for talent management at the Pentagon. His idea was to attract technology experts so that they could take up positions in the Army when necessary. He met Sankar at a conference in early 2024 and began discussing the idea, which ended up crystallizing into a project that Donald Trump promoted. Finger designations. A curiosity: among that group of chosen ones there were no Anthropic executives even though the company was the one that ended up being the chosen one in July 2025 to integrate its AI model, Claude, into Pentagon systems. Then, how do we know, things changed. On Wired they explain how Sankar was the one who volunteered to be part of the project, but also recommended the three people who would end up forming that group with him. What will these four managers do in the Army?. The official mission of these experts is to integrate specialized knowledge in AI, software and data analysis into the Pentagon’s strategy. parameter gave an example: The commander of the Indo-Pacific region is evaluating threats in the Far East for the next ten years and has asked Detachment 201 to explain how AI can affect security in that context. These new lieutenant colonels can also operate more tactically, advising on how soldiers can use the new tools at their disposal. Or what is the same: they will act as consultants to the US Army, but in uniform and having taken the oath, something important because the relationship with the soldiers changes. The inevitable conflict of interest. The Army affirms that there is no conflict of interest because the members of Detachment 201 will not have a vote in the contracts signed with the private sector. The chronology of events tells us otherwise, however: A month before Bosworth took office, Meta announced an agreement with Anduril to develop military augmented reality products. A few months before OpenAI announced an alliance with Anduril in air defense systems. Palantir, Sankar’s company, signed a contract with the Army worth 480 million dollars in December 2024. That doesn’t prove anything, but suspicions are inevitable, because even if they don’t have a vote, they will be able to obtain internal knowledge and data that inevitably benefits their employer companies. But weren’t there going to be limits on AI in the army? Another of the thorny questions that arise from this Detachment 201 is how the recommendations of these experts will be applied on the battlefield. OpenAI theoretically has policies prohibiting its AI models from causing harm or developing military weaponry. However, the explicit mission of this body is to make the US Army be “more lethal”. That contradicts OpenAI statementswhich after allying itself with the Pentagon recently stressed again and again that its models would be used within limits… which is exactly why the Pentagon ended up wanting to turn Anthropic into a pariah company. Two weeks to get the rank. A conventional lieutenant colonel reaches that rank after between fifteen and twenty years of active military career. The members of Detachment 201 received that same rank after two weeks of partially online training that included physical conditioning, shooting as a diagnosis and basic notions of military protocol such as the rank structure and the use of the uniform. They did not complete basic training and have the flexibility to fulfill part of their 120 annual hours of service from home, something not offered to other reservists. All of this has generated reviews within the Army and also comments of all kinds on social networks. Image | DVIDS In Xataka | Anthropic and OpenAI have developed AI. The US Pentagon is showing you who really owns it

Within Meta there is a race to see which employee consumes the most AI tokens. It’s the ‘Tokenmaxxing’ of Silicon Valley

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There is a battle within Meta: see who spends the most AI tokens. This is the basic unit that AI uses to understand the language with which we order actions. It is like the “bridge” between our words and the numbers that the machine can process and, therefore, when ChatGPT either Google They present a model, they brag about the millions of tokens they can process. But tokens are also becoming a ‘spending’ unit in AI companies. Silicon Valleyso much so that they may be generating a toxic work culture. And Meta is an example of a company where employees compete to see how many tokens they can consume to become a Token Legend. Tokenmaxxing. It is not the first time that we talked about this. A few days ago, Jensen Huang -CEO of NVIDIA and one of the main instigators of this phenomenon- commented that he would be worried if an engineer who earns $500,000 did not spend at least $250,000 a year on tokens. Because tokens cost money and NVIDIA is already considering offering tokens as part of the signing bonuses for its artificial intelligence engineers. Goals. As it could not be otherwise, Meta does not want to miss this party. The company, which changed its name when the metaverse was going to be the big thing and, after the swerveis defined as a “native AI company”, is one of those that promotes its artificial intelligence engineers to keep a count of the tokens spent during their day. There is no official data, but there are reports revealed to media such as Business Insider and The Information which point out that some of these teams have very specific objectives related to the use of tokens. For example, the company expects 65% of its engineers to write more than 75% of code using AI tools by the middle of this year. The Scalable Machine Learning division has another objective, and so on in each of the code-related departments within Meta. Legend Token. In The Information, they directly point out that there is an internal classification table created by the employees themselves to gamify the work. It shows the 250 most intensive AI users in their tasks with an easy premise: the more tokens you spend, the more you climb in the ranking. The winner of this particular competition takes the title of ‘Token Legend’, or ‘Legend of Tokens’. It is turning an expectation into a kind of internal sport. The first paragraph of this article converted to tokens crazy spending. If we put the first paragraph of 542 words in the tool ‘tokenizer‘ from OpenAI, we see that that simple phrase has already consumed 121 tokens. Well: according to The Information, in the last 30 days the total token panel usage of that internal table was more than 60 billion (of ours) tokens And even if they want to dress it for sports and competition, it is still obligatory. In late 2025, Meta launched the ‘Level Up’ program where employees who complete the most tasks using AI earn badges. And more important than this: it made the use of AI a central criterion in its employee performance evaluations. This, obviously, sets salary and promotion objectives. Doubts. But of course, beyond paying to work, there are other underlying issues. One of the criticisms of this tokenmaxxing system is that AI companies like Meta or NVIDIA encourage spending more on tokens because, in this way, their own employees become consumers of the product they are creating. An easy example that software engineering analyst Gergely Orosz exposed which is as if Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said that if one of his employees who earns $500,000 a year did not spend $50,000 on purchases in the App Store, he would be worried. Orosz continuous stating that productivity should not be measured in tokens spent, but in the results obtained. Industry issue. In any case, Meta and NVIDIA are not the only ones that measure their employees by their consumption of AI at work. It is something that is soaking in other AI majors, turning the tokens into an extra work benefit incorporated into the engineers’ remuneration wheel along with the base salary, performance bonuses and shares. HE esteem that an OpenAI engineer can process 210 billion tokens in a week and there are Claude Code engineers who accumulate more than $150,000 in tokens in one month. Basically it is merging part of your salary into the company that pays you. And… have they said anything from Meta? Yes, it’s not about volume, but about quality, pointing that performance rewards are based on the impact of the work and not the raw use of AI. Image | ‘Wolf of Wall Street’, Meta Logo. Edited In Xataka | Google Earth shows the world. The Spanish Xoople wants AI to understand it

Meta has ended up firing its developers to pay for AI

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Mark Zuckerberg’s company is not having its best week. To the sanctions imposed by a US court for not protecting users of the addictive consequences of their platformsjoins a new round of layoffs that affects hundreds of people in five business areas. It’s not the first time so far this year, and it probably won’t be the last either. We cannot say that the measure has caught Meta employees by surprise, because a few days ago Reuters I was already ahead that the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was planning to cut staff due to the increased costs of AI development. Now have materialized eliminating the departments closest to the metaverse. 700 employees on the street and a metaverse that goes out. According to published NBC Based on sources close to the company, Meta will lay off about 700 employees in this round. The cuts will affect Reality Labs, the division that for years was the flagship of Zuckerberg’s big bet on the metaverse, which just a few days ago announced the Horizon Worlds closure on Quest headsetsas well as some in the human resources departments, sales and Facebook employees, as pointed out The New York Times. Those affected are a small fraction of the nearly 78,000 employees that Meta currently has on staff, but the reason given by the company is already a classic in big tech: “Meta’s teams restructure or implement changes periodically to guarantee that they are in the best position to achieve their objectives,” said a Meta spokesperson. in a statement to which you have had access NBC. Layoffs down, bonuses up. Hours before these layoffs were announced, Meta presented a new stock compensation program for six of its senior managers. The message between the lines has not gone unnoticed. While the company cut staff with the argument of reducing costs to face the huge investments in AIwith a forecast of expenses of between 162,000 and 169,000 million dollars for 2026, the executives closest to Zuckerberg saw their compensation increased by up to 921 million dollars each for the next five years. Meta justifies the increase to its managers as a tool to retain talent in the middle of the war for the best AI profiles, but the temporal coincidence between both announcements could not have been more unfortunate. ​Layoffs without financial hardship. Historically, a company laying off its employees was a clear sign of financial problems. Instead, in the age of AI, each round of layoffs is celebrated on the financial markets with increases in the price of shares because it is a clear sign that the company is restructuring to adapt to changes in strategy for the development of AI and continue generating million-dollar income. In fact, one of the phenomena that is occurring In the latest rounds of layoffs in large technology companies, while hundreds of employees are being laid off from certain departments, new vacancies are opening up. to hire new employees with another profile more AI oriented. ​Meta is not an isolated case. What happens in Meta is part of a dynamic that is repeated throughout the sector. Amazon, Microsoft and other big tech companies have announced massive cuts in recent months, and in all cases the AI appears as the main justification for layoffs. According to data From the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, AI has been the argument for 12,304 layoffs so far in 2026, the equivalent of 8% of all layoffs recorded in that same period.​ In Xataka | Mark Zuckerberg spent millions on a “superintelligence” team. He is dedicating it to creating a personal AI agent for you Image | Goal

Meta hit it big, betting everything on the metaverse. Now they have a Schrödinger metaverse

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We often see large companies change the design of their logos. They do it to maintain consistency with the product they are promoting at that moment, but the logo is one thing and the name and the entire brand are another. Facebook fearlessly jumped into the pool in October 2021 changing its name to Metaof ‘metaverse‘. After lose tens of billions and with the metaverse buried, Meta confirmed the inevitable: it will close the Horizon Worlds platform this year. But there is a twist: after announcing the closure, they now say that they will keep it alive for a while longer. How much? Mystery. In short. One of the most iconic moments of the technology presentations was when, in a packed room, Mark Zuckerberg walked between rows of journalists wearing a Quest helmet. The metaverse had arrived, or so Zuckerberg wanted. Years later, the reality is very different from future they hoped for Facebook Goalbut the name change had already been done and had to be accepted. ‘Horizon Worlds’ was the platform on which we could lead a second life, one that nor the employees of the Meta itself they used. To the metaverse he was doing badly, extremely badand Meta tried to make it stick in every possible way taking it to mobile and integrating it with Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Meta announced the plan as one to bring the metaverse everywherebut a few hours ago, Meta took the final step: he announced that on June 15 he would close ‘Horizon Worlds’ in the Quest helmets. Lowering the blind. Although the metaverse is everywhere, it is evident that the most natural way to access it is through virtual reality. However, it is clear that they are not going the way they would have liked and, in a release On Discord, the company confirmed that virtual worlds could no longer be created, published, or accessed in VR after that date. It was announced that the closure would be carried out in stages, killing applications from the Quest store starting on March 31 so that no more users can join, culminating with the definitive closure of the VR worlds on June 15. In the announcement, Meta confirmed that ‘Horizon Worlds’ will, from now on, be a mobile-only app. It seemed like the culmination of a process that, apart from burning money, has led Meta to lay off hundreds of workers and hit a 30% blow to the budget of the Reality Labs division. Schrödinger’s metaverse. But it is clear that those who are still in the metaverse did not like the news at all, to the point that Meta has had to come out to clarify the message… and back away. Although they have done it in a curious way. In a question session on Instagram, the company’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, came to the fore to comment that the dead man is very much alive, that they have thought better of it and that ‘Horizon Worlds’ will remain in VR for “the near future.” The statements are as follows: “The ‘Horizon Unity Runtime’ games do not work on mobile, only in VR, and we will not be introducing new games. Again, most of our strategy is aimed at mobile, but people who already have games they like will be able to download the ‘Horizon Worlds’ app and use it in VR in the near future.” In the units of measurement, “near future” is not that it is very concrete, but at least it seems that they do not kill it yet due to, according to Bosworth, showing support “to the fans who have contacted us.” He has commented on it in stories (something that, conveniently, will be deleted), but here is the video: Other type of glasses. Come on, where I said I say, I say Diego and the Quest metaverse will continue to live for a while longer. As a user, I wouldn’t throw my hat in the ring because it’s clear that they are planning a closure sooner rather than later, but it is always good news that they have listened to those who continue using the platform. Because the Quest, beyond ‘Horizon World’, is an extremely interesting headset for playing and consuming content, but Meta has been betting on another type of glasses for some time. There are the Ray-Ban Meta, “normal” glasses that are used not to consume, but to create. Already in 2024 we said that Meta was giving a flip from your VR glasses to your everyday glasses because the Ray-Ban Meta is not only a tool for content creators and anyone who wants to record their daily lives: it is a device through which Meta can distribute its AI. And an extremely controversial one, based on what we now know about Where can the images we record end up? with those glasses. And AI, of course. Because if years ago it was the metaverse, now Meta’s obsession is AI. The company is focusing on this technology in which it is not very well positioned. They focused a lot on preparing and presenting very good models, but not very consumer friendly and it was the big loser of the AI ​​race last year. Their change in strategy seeks to gain a foothold in a segment in which they are already ChatGPT, Grok, Claude or the chineseand for this it has a double strategy. On the one handa super team of AI stars whose machine will have to start working at some point. On the other hand, a collaboration with NVIDIA and another with AMD to train the AI, as well as the development of own chips for inference. There is 135 billion dollars at stakean investment in one year that exceeds the total of the Metaverse and that indicates why it is logical for Meta to abandon anything that does not work for him in the slightest right now in order to allocate all possible resources to pursue the new objective. Images | Goal … Read more

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