For thousands of Meta employees, it’s now the AI way or the highway.<\/p>\n
As 8,000 Meta employees<\/a> were reading their layoff notices on Wednesday, 7,000 others opened a very different email. They had been selected to join a new AI initiative spun up directly by CEO Mark Zuckerberg \u2014 and it would be crucial to accelerating Meta’s position in the AI race.<\/p>\n Many employees learned they would move into a group called Applied AI (AAI), which Meta created earlier this year, led by engineering vice president Maher Saba and reporting to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth.<\/p>\n Others were recruited to groups more specifically focused on AI agents. These include a group named “Agent Transformation Accelerator,” headed by Bosworth, and a team named “Agent Data and Optimization,” according to internal messages shared with Business Insider.<\/p>\n “This is a reflection of your impact,” said one email, which told recipients they were picked for their “strong performance” and technical abilities, a copy reviewed by Business Insider read.<\/p>\n “You were identified as someone who can make a real impact on this team,” it added.<\/p>\n Amid this week’s cuts to Meta’s 78,000-person workforce, the reassignments to these AI teams have offered a lifeline for some staffers worried about getting let go, even if they are still uncertain about what their new roles entail.<\/p>\n Many companies are reorganizing around AI, with some, like Disney,\u00a0tracking usage<\/a>\u00a0and others, like Visa, rewarding teams<\/a> that build products faster. Meta has made especially sweeping<\/a> changes. It has formed a superintelligence lab, organized teams into smaller AI-native “pods,”<\/a> and changed some employees’ job titles to “AI builder.”<\/p>\n “I got drafted,” one person said in a Discord server where Meta employees discussed the layoffs. <\/p>\n “Welcome to the draft,” another posted.<\/p>\n Meta’s AI models have so far trailed those of rivals such as OpenAI and Google in performance, and leaders have identified an opportunity to enlist Meta employees to better train the technology.<\/p>\n A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.<\/p>\n Inside Meta’s AI draft<\/p>\n Joining the new initiative, it turns out, is non-negotiable \u2014 and different recruits have received the news with either relief, dread, or confusion, according to four employees who spoke with Business Insider and several forum posts.<\/p>\n On Blind, an anonymous workplace app, a section locked to verified Meta employees was flooded with posts from people announcing they had been drafted. Some asked what AAI actually does.<\/p>\n Two Meta employees said they expect the new AI task forces to involve data labeling \u2014 the grunt work of manually tagging images or correcting chatbot responses.<\/p>\n That’s an area where Meta’s AI chief, Alexandr Wang, has extensive experience. Wang is the cofounder and former CEO of Scale AI<\/a>, one of the world’s biggest data-labeling companies, which relies on armies of contractors to train AI.<\/p>\n Meta has been rolling out other AI initiatives internally. It has launched an internal tool to track employees’ keystrokes<\/a> and mouse movements, known as Model Capability Initiative, Business Insider previously reported.<\/p>\n An internal announcement in April about the software said that AI models still lacked the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks such as coding.<\/p>\n “For agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples,” the post said.<\/p>\n In a leaked audio recording<\/a> from an internal meeting that same month, Zuckerberg said that Wang knew the data-labeling world well, and then offered a blunt addendum: The average Meta employee has a “significantly higher” intelligence than those contractors \u2014 so he’d rather “enlist” top employees from across Meta to train its AI instead.<\/p>\n “I think that this is going to be a very big advantage, if we can do it,” he said, adding that it remained a “hypothesis” for the time being.<\/p>\n Have something to share? Contact Hugh Langley via email at hlangley@businessinsider.com<\/a> or Signal at 628-228-1836. Contact Charles Rollet via email at crollet@businessinsider.com<\/a> or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Use a personal email address and a non-work device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For thousands of Meta employees, it’s now the AI way or the highway. 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