Tag Archives: facebook AI strategy

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They Will Exploit Everything: Hand Surveillance at Meta Platforms

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Meta Platforms began laying off thousands of employees in May 2026 and reassigning thousands of others to AI-focused roles. The layoffs would affect 10% of the company, or roughly 8,000 employees, and that the company would also cancel plans to hire for 6,000 open roles….Meta is full steam ahead into a gargantuan effort to reimagine its workforce and become more nimble to compete with AI-native startups. The company has flattened teams and started tracking employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks to help train its AI models on how to use computers.

Sentiment among the company’s staffers is at its most negative level on record. More than 1,500 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta dies not collect employee “computer-use” data to train its AI models. When asked if there was a way to opt out of the AI computer-tracking program, a Meta executive replied that there wasn’t.

Excerpt from Meghan Bobrowsky et al, Meta Begins Laying Off Thousands of Employees as It Transforms Around AI Investments, WSJ, May 20, 2026

The Price of Political Obedience: the Yes Men are not Revolting Yet

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Co-founder Dario Amodei has made safety and social responsibility central to Anthropic’s approach to AI. Usage restrictions governing its contract with the Pentagon stipulate that its AI cannot be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon, which objects to outside limits on what its troops can do, wants unrestricted access for all lawful purposes… If Anthropic was too inflexible, the Pentagon could have simply terminated the contract. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went further, declaring on X that “no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.” Such declaration, according to commentators, amounted to “corporate murder”, The “message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.”

Excerpt from Greg Ip, Anthropic’s Pentagon Battle Matters to Every Business, WSJ, Mar. 13, 2026

Can AI Do That? Knowledge Impossible to Copy

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Zuckerberg hasn’t had much success in his efforts to hire the field’s biggest stars, including OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever and its chief research officer, Mark Chen. Many candidates are happy to take a meeting at Zuckerberg’s homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. In private, they are comparing gossip and calculating Meta’s chances of winning the AI race.

The handful of researchers who are smartest about AI have built up what one described as “tribal knowledge” that is almost impossible to replicate. Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in San Francisco, where they discuss papers that might provide clues for achieving the next great breakthrough. 

Excerpt from Ben Coen et al, It’s Known as ‘The List’—and It’s a Secret File of AI Geniuses, WSJ, June 27, 2025

Why Zuckerberg is Always Winning? the Magic of Free

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Mark Zuckerberg has an unusual plan for winning the artificial-intelligence race: giving away his company’s technology free betting that providing the hottest new technology free will drive down competitors’ prices and spread Meta’s version of AI more broadly, giving Zuckerberg more control over the way people interact with machines in the future… Meta felt the cost of not controlling its own destiny when Apple decided in 2021 to cut off its ability to gather data on their users without asking for permission—something Meta had relied on to target ads. The company said it took a hit of more than $10 billion in revenue in 2022 as a direct result. The company’s stock swooned 26%.

For the AI-giveaway strategy to work, Meta must get its billions of users to look to those free AI services in the same way they flocked to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It wagers that advertising can come later, as it did in the past. Meta’s ability to turn eyeballs into ad dollars is well established…

Meta in April 2024 released its most recent generative AI tool—dubbed Llama 3—free for any company to use and repurpose so long as they have fewer than 700 million users. And it integrated chatbots based on Llama 3 into Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and on the web.  “All of our properties are free, we help people connect with each other, and we want to help connect people with AIs that can help them get things done,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s always been our playbook. That’s what the company ethos is about…

Excerpts from Excepts from Salvador Rodriguez, Facebook Parent’s Plan to Win AI Race: Give Its Tech Away Free, WSJ May 19, 2024