Technology

Even if the whole idea of having employees use AI as much as possible wasn't stupid in and of itself tracking token usage is a terrible way to do it.

It's like trying to work out how much work has been done in a warehouse by tracking employees calories, sure the people who've burnt more calories have probably done more work but it's not one to one equivalency.

I can mess around with an AI for an hour using thousands of tokens up and produce nothing tangible at the end. If I'm going back and forth trying to get an AI to write a piece of code and that takes me an hour to get a result that I could have written myself in 15 minutes, then I'm not being productive. But I sure as hell used up a lot of tokens.

Damn. I wish I could waste over a million dollars and have my employer see it as a good thing.

I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can't tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.

Yeah the thing that pro-ai zealots don’t get is that if they’re right and AI is the future, then being left behind is ultimately not up to you. The point of AI is to leave workers behind. Embracing it doesn’t do anything to save you, it just accelerates the end of your own job.

It's kind of sad in hindsight. I remember around 8-10 years ago or so a conversation about unionization amongst programmers came up and almost universally the response was "lol why would I ever unionize? Just hop companies."

Welp.

Don't worry, they've definitely hitched their horse on the right Next Big Thing this time!

He didn't and doesn't care.

zuckerborg thought he could download the thoughts of humans into his robot body, but he doesnt have the technology to do so.

I don't understand how Facebook has so many employees. What do they do, what does their standard day look like.

If I don't show up to my job there's loads of tasks that wouldn't get done but Facebook is a website, it can't honestly need so many employees especially when they never really change anything.

Not including the cuts mentioned here, it looks like meta has reduced the number of employees by about 20% so far compared to last years highest count.

The other have seemingly kept hiring so their staff cuts have not shown in official numbers as far as I can tell. source

There was this site making the rounds a few years ago and it still seems updated: https://layoffs.fyi/

No AI could replicate zuckerberg's robotic nature.

He's majority shareholder or has some trick to never be dethroned.

Don't know if they can. If I'm recalling correctly he holds enough Class B shares to retain supermajority voting power.

Their AI must be shit if they can only lay off 10%.

A good AI would let you lay off at least 50%

Of course it is:

I've been there, (not exactly but in a similar situation) it's just something to stick on your resume. People get massively over excited if they hear you worked at one of the big tech companies. The automatically assume that everyone who works there is a super genius. This even works for Microsoft employees.

This happens because recruiters never know anything about the industry that they're recruiting for, so they're just looking for easy hints and "worked at Meta" is a good, if not particularly necessarily accurate, hint that this person knows what they're talking about.

I thought about it before (a Meta recruiter contacted me a couple years ago). The expected total compensation was insane. But, I would've likely had to move, I despise the company, and they were already doing stupid layoffs back then too, so decided not to move forward.