Inside Meta’s Big AI Pivot

**Ryan Knutson** (0:05)
Last week, Meta said it was laying off 10% of its roughly 80,000 employees.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
Meta says it will lay off about 8,000 employees starting next month. The company is also canceling plans to fill 6,000 open roles as it plans to invest more on developing artificial intelligence.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:22)
The layoffs are part of a larger transformation that's happening within Meta right now, as the company tries to reinvent itself as an AI powerhouse. Meta said it would use the savings from the layoffs to balance out its huge investments in AI. This year, the company is planning to spend up to $135 billion on the technology. For the employees who are left, they're being asked to incorporate AI into their jobs. Teams are being flattened, and in performance reviews, workers are assessed by how much they use AI.
Meta isn't just using AI to make its employees more efficient. The company is also using its workforce, and the way they work, like at their desks, to train the company's most advanced AI models.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (1:08)
A memo went out on Tuesday from a researcher who works on building the models, and they said, hey guys, our models need to get better at learning how to use computers.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:21)
That's our colleague, Meghan Bobrowsky.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (1:23)
So therefore, we are now going to be monitoring your keystrokes, your mouse movements, and your click locations, feed that data to our AI models to help them understand basically how to use a computer.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:38)
That sounds kind of dystopian.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (1:41)
A lot of employees were not happy about this. The top-rank comment on this post was, this makes me super uncomfortable. How can I opt out?
Spoiler, there is no way to opt out.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:56)
So, it seems like Meta is going all-in, like in every conceivable way, from the products that it's making to what it expects of its own employees.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (2:06)
Yeah, it's AI all the time. Mark Zuckerberg himself is working on building a CEO agent to help him do his job. They've also just announced initiatives across the board, trying to get their employees to adopt these things.
And then, it's almost for not to be punny, but-

**Ryan Knutson** (2:23)
We love puns here.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (2:25)
Well, it's very meta, right? They're building these AI products that they want billions of people to use. And the way they're doing that is by trying to get their workforce to adopt AI to build the AI.
So AI to build the AI.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:41)
Where does meta stack up in the AI world right now? And how hard would you say it's fighting to catch up?

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (2:48)
Yes, those are two different things. Where it is, it's not the best. How hard it's trying might be trying the hardest of any of the companies.

**Ryan Knutson** (3:03)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Tuesday, April 28th.
Coming up on the show, how Meta is going all in on AI.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:29)
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**Ryan Knutson** (4:04)
Meta started an AI research lab in 2013
But in the last few years, Meta's AI tools have trailed behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which have been making big strides developing AI chatbots that can do research, write cover letters and even code. Last year, to try and up its game, Meta started poaching top AI talent with huge offers.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:30)
Meta now notching another name in its expensive hunt for AI talent, poaching a top Apple executive.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:35)
Coming from the buzziest and earliest AI native firms, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (4:41)
Meta finds itself sort of racing to catch up, right? And so they were giving out $100 million dollars offers to researchers trying to basically rebuild this team and become competitive.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:53)
Multi-year deals were $300 million dollars.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:57)
These are for scientists and engineers.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:00)
This is wild. It's like NBA superstar money.

**SPEAKER_6** (5:03)
With some of them receiving $100 million dollars straight up in year one.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (5:07)
$100 million dollars.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:08)
Wow.

**Meghan Bobrowsky** (5:09)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so they build this new team. They hire Alexander Wang from Scale AI, and they basically just redo their whole AI efforts from scratch.